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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 07 Oct 2010
Time: 08:32:08 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.31
Dear Cara, You are right that Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT) has been used for various aphasic individuals, especially those who have a hard time retrieving words. (Maybe I need some. <smile>) At the same time, it is almost a given that people who stutter do not stutter when they sing (although as you might remember from your undergraduate class, there are exceptions). The reason MIT is not recommended for all but the most severe stutterers, or sometimes neurogenic stutterers, is that most stutterers do not want to "sing" their speech. They simply would rather stutter. Why don't individuals with aphasia feel the same way? That is not my area, but my guess is that some do. However, if the choice was not to be able to communicate at all or communicate with a highly artificially sounding speech, most people would choose the latter. As my good friend, Michael, said, yours is a good question. A better option is to take some of the aspects of singing, e.g., slower rate, prolonged syllables, and slower voice onsets, and package them into a well-established fluency shaping program for therapy. Ken