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From: Ken Logan
Date: 13 Oct 2010
Time: 13:21:53 -0500
Remote Name: 128.227.105.141
This is an interesting question. My first reaction is that a speaker who is not "at peace" with his her stuttering will indeed probably find it very difficult to smile much while in a speaking role. That is, if one is focused on issues like "I wonder what the listener is thinking about me right now?" or is making negative self-evaluations internally when stuttering (e.g., "C'mon man, you can talk better than that!), then it probably would be difficult to smile in any authentic way. Now, a little anecdote: I worked with a person many years back who told me that he found it easier to talk fluently if he smiled while talking. And, he did, in fact, break out into a big smile periodically, and sort of kept a "background smile" on his face at other times. I'm not sure whether it truly did help fluency that much, but I remember noticing that the big smiles usually coincided with pauses, and sometimes people find that fluency improves when they increase pause frequency.