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From: Lara Toews
Date: 18 Oct 2005
Time: 12:51:34 -0500
Remote Name: 140.160.12.36
This article is truly interesting. The subject of stuttering is a fascinating topic to me as I am a relatively new student in the field of Communication Sciences & Disorders at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. To sum your article, Dr. Drayna, you are attempting to reach the conclusion that stuttering is not a learned disorder, rather it is innate or genetically predisposed. My question then would be: Since stuttering and genetic predisposition seem to have a strong relationship to one another and there has been much research around this area, does ethnicity play a role at all? For instance, do people in South Africa stutter any more that people in Eastern Europe? If the twin studies that you mentioned in your article were proved to be true, we could see how living in different societies would affect a person’s stuttering. Perhaps the gene would appear in a civilization that associated a negative social stigma to the disorder, and would not appear (or not be as severe) in a society that had more social acceptance towards communicative difficulties. What do you think about this? I find this area of stuttering research captivating because the more we know about what causes stuttering, the more we can do for people seeking treatment.