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From: Lisa LaSalle
Date: 13 Apr 2010
Time: 13:22:03 -0500
Remote Name: 137.28.24.121
Hi Isabella, This is a Professor-to-Professor question, but it is timely for me so I will ask it. As a University Clinic Supervisor, I have been fortunate to work with a young 23yo man from Russia who has lived here in the US for 5+ years. His English skills are quite good. He stutters, has stuttered since childhood, altho he reports a late onset, and he might even be diagnosed as someone who clutters in his native language, or at he least speaks at a fast rate and he occasionally shows as many non-stutters (revisions and interjections) as stutterlike disfluencies. He has gotten considerably more fluent in English since he began speech therapy with us 3+ years ago, but now he is working on becoming more fluent in Russian, a language that he stutters more in now, possibly because he speaks it less frequently. he reports using Russian about 20% of his day at the most, just when talking with his sister and parents. I am again fortunate to have a native Ukranian graduate student clinician in our program, Ganna Bakhtiyarova, assigned to work with him. So they have been doing sessions in mostly Russian! The question that Ganna and I have of you is this: Are you aware of any specific techniques for fluency therapy in Russian that are specific to the phonetic features of the Russian language? --Lisa P.S. It was fun to spend time with you last August at the IFA Congress in Rio!