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Re: How did Joe Biden recover from stuttering without therapy?

From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 30 Sep 2012
Time: 14:27:14 -0500
Remote Name: 70.100.74.59

Comments

Hello Jim, Good question about Joe Biden. Ideally, we could just write and ask him, but I suspect with the election coming up, he would be too busy to reply at this time. <smile> Joe did talk about his stuttering as a keynote speaker at a National Stuttering Association Convention several years ago. Unfortunately, I missed that convention. My guess is that someone here who was there will remember what he said that relates to his "recovery." If so, I hope they will weigh in. You may know that most young children who begin to stutter stop stuttering without any formal treatment. We call that spontaneous recovery. That was not the case for Joe, however. A number of people, myself included, stuttered significantly as children, teenagers, and even young adults but, for the most part, recovered after that. Patrick Finn has done some good research on stutterers who recovered later in life. Another study that will allegedly soon be published by German researcher, Katrin Neumann, also looks at recovery in adults who stutter. Maybe in a few years, we'll have some better answers to this important question of why some stutterers mostly recover (and a rare few, completely recover) and why some do not. I hope this helps a little bit. Ken


Last changed: 10/22/12