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From: Janis Ingham
Date: 10/10/02
Time: 2:13:13 PM
Remote Name: 128.111.217.139
Ed - Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the range of stutterer characteristics that could/should be studied separately. Certainly we are not willing to state, at this point, that stuttering is the same (neurologically) for all people who stutter, but we have to start someplace - by studying representative groups of people who stutter. An important conceptual rationale for this approach is that finding the commonalities across various "kinds" of people who stutter has the potential of leading us more quickly to the factors that are fundamental to stuttering.
As you could tell by this manuscript, however, we are also beginning to look at "subgroups" of stutterers, as you're suggesting - given that this paper was about studying women and men separately. Still, the more valuable aspects of the findings had to do with the factors related to stuttering that occurred in both groups, rather than the ways in which they were different.
As your question, and others, point out: there are a lot of interesting questions yet to be studied. We, and other who are using brain imaging with stutterers, just haven't gotten to all of them yet! Given more time and more dollars (imaging is quite expensive), we will.