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Re: Effectiveness of DAF in Stuttering

From: Ken Logan
Date: 11 Oct 2012
Time: 16:26:35 -0500
Remote Name: 128.227.131.31

Comments

Based on my experiences, many (but not all) people who stutter experience some facilitative effect from DAF. The extent certainly varies across individuals. I don't have precise numbers at my fingertips, but for some people the improvement in fluency can be quite substantial. The real question, to me, is how long the facilitative effects last. Just to echo (no pun intended!) Walt's comments, I see DAF as a catalyst (perhaps only short lived?!) for changes in the speech articulation process. It may, as he suggested, promote greater reliance on proprioceptive monitoring and/or possibly greater reliance upon auditory or tactile feedback. Some recent research with typical speakers has examined the effects of certain physical and acoustic "perturbations" upon the neural activation patterns associated with speech production. Not surprisingly, when a speaker's feedback system encounters something unexpected or unusual (e.g., a mechanical constraint upon movement of the jaw; suddenly hearing one's voice played back at an atypical pitch), certain neural pathways that had been "quiet" suddenly become active...and the process of speech production is thought to change from a state of running on 'autopilot' to running in a more actively planned manner.


Last changed: 10/22/12