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From: Pat
Date: 11 Oct 2010
Time: 16:45:48 -0500
Remote Name: 74.198.12.4
Hello Janet, You describe an interesting case. Others have seen similar patterns: the stuttering only becomes apparent once a certain level of proficiency/language learning is reached. Mirror neurons (currently The Big Thing in neurology)could be one explanation. We need to be careful not to do what so many have done over the centuries which is to use one of the latest medical discoveries as the cause or the cure for stuttering. Leeches, bleeding, Freudian psychoanalysis, shock therapy to name just a few of the instances of "let's try our Current Big Thing and see what the effect is on stuttering". Besides the possibility that mirror neurons are involved in the changing fluency, there are others, including the role playing effect ("look at me, I'm pretending to be someone who speaks French and it's completely different from my regular speech"). Similar to an actor on stage. Or it could be a question of speaking rate (which increased as he learned more French). Slow, fairly evenly paced speech is how most people learning a language talk, as they have to think word by word through their (fractured) sentence. Or it could be linked to utterance length increasing. Or it could be some combination of some or all of these possible explanations. OR it could be something I have not listed. We need so many studies to sort this all out! First step is to publish cases with good descriptions of the participants' language backgrounds and proficiency levels, and thorough assessments, using standard methodology so that we can compare across languages and across studies. Otherwise, it will all just be a big muddle.