From: Scott
Date: 10 Oct 2012
Time: 12:35:45 -0500
Remote Name: 150.212.111.241
hey Ken - nice to see you on the list. Thanks for your post. When I teach about this, I always differentiate the definitions in 2 key ways: (a) the perspective and (b) the scope. For perspective, i talk about how stuttering might be defined from the perspective of the speaker AND from the perspective of the listener. For the speaker, I go loss of control (Perkins). For the listener, I do a Johnson/Wingate/type of disfluency type of thing. Then, I talk about the surface features vs. the adverse impact - stuttering as a behavior (which is related to the listener's perspective) and stuttering as a disorder (which is related to the speaker's perspective). I never really thought of offering it as separate definitions, but rather, different ways of looking at the same nebulous thing. I'm not sure it makes sense to anybody but me, but at least it makes sense to me. While I'm writing - I can't resist. I fundamentally reject the notion that the observable stuttering behaviors as defined by the listener can ever be viewed as the "primary" problem. I think to view stuttering as such is to completely misunderstand and mischaracterize the disorder. The primary problem MUST be defined from the speaker's perspective - and as such, MUST involve more than just the behaviors that somebody else can see. (Obviously, this is in reference to the response to the LTE that a group of us published yesterday.) I think that type of misunderstanding by some in our field is the reason that we need better definitions and at the heart of this type of effort. Thanks again for your comments...sorry for spouting off a bit... ;-) S