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From: Ken Logan
Date: 14 Oct 2010
Time: 07:57:13 -0500
Remote Name: 98.70.129.81
I'd agree with the others...I don't think one can make another person who is otherwise not predisposed to stuttering, develop the speech disorder that we call "stuttering." I have noted, however, that normally fluent speakers do sometimes produce isolated instabilities in speech movements that look very much like stuttering. Let me explain...in my graduate stuttering class, I have students practice the various fluency management skills that are commonly used in treatment. I've noticed that when some student clinicians are first attempting, for example, to produce a consonant using slow, gentle onset, they may exhibit brief tremor, very mild "blocking" and so forth. Is this "stuttering" in the same sense that a person who stutters experiences stuttering? Probably not. But it has some similarities. The students' disfluent speech patterns resolve quickly, after they gain more experience with producing the movements (so no one is becoming a "person who stutters"!). But, in some normally fluent speakers, there are some stutter-like patterns when the articulatory movements are at that stage where they requires lots of conscious monitoring and deliberate control to produce.