Video: People Who Stutter, INSPIRE!

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Re: Great video!

From: David Shapiro
Date: 07 Oct 2010
Time: 10:58:48 -0500
Remote Name: 152.30.155.32

Comments

Hi Cara, I agree with Michael and Ken that you are asking an excellent question. We do know that people who stutter typically do not stutter when singing or engaged in choral reading or speaking; we can describe it. What we’re not quite as good at is explaining it, or telling why this happens. Some treatments do “shape” the speech sound into a form that, at first, more resembles song; later the pattern is adjusted to approach the sound of conversational speech. Like Ken indicated, however, the “sing-song” type sound can be awkward at best. I had client from the Southeast in the USA who accentuated his accent so as to blur the distinction between speech and song (i.e., when speaking, he deliberately lengthened vowels and exaggerated diphthongs with highly variable pitch contours; he – not I - referred to this as “hillbilly speech”). When provided the opportunity to study and understand his speech fluency, to increase his absolute and relative amount of fluency, and to learn and utilize specific fluency facilitating controls (evenness of rate, gentleness of onset, and naturalness of inflection), he no longer needed to use such tricks to enjoy fluency control. Here’s another question for you to consider. There is a small literature revealing that some people who stutter demonstrate “stuttering” when playing a musical wind instrument; Why do you think this happens? Keep your questions coming; they’re good. I think the best questions are those that make us think the most, not those for which the answer seems easily attainable. The tougher questions move our discipline ahead. Thanks, David


Last changed: 10/23/10