[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Ken Logan
Date: 06 Oct 2010
Time: 21:51:06 -0500
Remote Name: 74.179.112.136
These are both interesting questions. I'll try to tackle the first issue (stuttering and signing). There hasn't been much research on the sign language skills of people who stutter. I can provide some anecdotal information based on my personal experience. For the first five years of my career I had the opportunity to work with several youngsters who had profound hearing loss. (This was back in the days before cochlear implants and we were using a total communication approach with Signed Exact English.) I signed with the kids every day, and never once did I have movement difficulties that, in my experience, were directly comparable to the ones I had in my speech (I should add here that I stutter.) That is, I never experienced difficulty initiating movement sequences (like I did often in speech) nor did I have what might be regarded as "part-sign repetition" (the analog of part-word repetition). That said, although I was competent with signing, I never regarded myself as a particularly fluent finger speller. I'd make a fair amount of errors, which I'd then have to stop to revise (or spell slower). Recent research on motor learning skills in people who stutter (e.g., Luc De Nil & colleagues' work) has shown that adults who stutter show evidence of impairment (in both speech and manual movements) during tasks that involve the acquisition of sequential motor movements. Based on this, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that people who stutter show subtle deficits in movement while signing. Still, in my experience, any such deficits that I might have had in signing did not feel to me like "stuttering."