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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/20/02
Time: 9:40:38 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.205
Hi Sharon,
The issue of multilingualism and stuttering is an area that needs lots of careful study. It seems to me that a large, international study is warranted. The literature is full of case studies and surveys that show that some stutterers stutter more in the native language (your experience and that of Lynne Shields [see earlier post]), more in the second, third, .... langage, or equally in all of them. Maybe it has to do with when the stuttering began, how early and completely the later language(s) were learned, aspects of the languages themselves, genetic factors, and so on. Only a large study would be able to have a chance of teasing that out. James Au-Yeung, Peter Howell, Steve Davis, Nicole Charles, and Stevie Sackin at the University College in London reported an ongoing on-line survey on this topic in 2000 at the IFA Congress in Denmark. Their preliminary findings were that there were no differences in the likehood of stuttering in monolingual and bilingual respondents. They also found that learning the second language at around the age of 3 years was somewhat more likely to result in stuttering for girls but (inexplicably) not for boys. I do not know if they asked your question, i.e., "Is there a difference in stuttering in the various languages?" You might wish to contact them for more details and an update.
Personally, I learned Turkish after the age of 20 in the Peace Corps. This was about two years after I more or less recovered from my stuttering in English. I always stuttered a lot in Turkish for the full two years and even in the 35 years since when I try to speak it again [what I can remember, that is ;-) ], even though I have remained mostly recovered in English. Go figure....
Maybe this will be of interest to you and the others.
Ken