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From: Nan Bernstein Ratner
Date: 19 Oct 2012
Time: 11:56:36 -0500
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203
The link between "stuttering" and Down Syndrome has been commented on before and appears real, although, given my work on language formulation problems and disfluency, it's not clear to me that all past work has clearly distinguished between canonical stuttering symptoms (blocks, prolongations of consonants) and those disfluencies that overlap with typical, language-learning and language disordered people's speech. Much of the historical info, however, about IQ and stuttering is hampered by old definitions of the "mentally retarded" (current term = intellectual disability)- tremendously varied populations with a number of ante-natal and post-natal brain damage wound up in these groups. Finally, as in language skill, the correlations between IQ and fluency are not likely to be very linear. IQ needs to be quite impaired before generalized effects on anything other than vocabulary are evident. So IQ, which is only a proxy measure of some kinds of verbal/nonverbal function, is likely to affect speech behaviors more below a certain threshold than across the board. Having said all this, we could certainly use more work in this area. best, Nan