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From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 09 Oct 2005
Time: 13:56:14 -0500
Remote Name: 69.22.238.4
Jodi, you ask some great questions that many people who stutter and clinicians must grapple with and consider. In one study on voluntary stuttering (see reference below), Saltuklaroglu, Kalinowski (2004) and their associates found that, “Simply put, stuttering inhibits stuttering.” You are concerned that, “the repeated act of voluntary stuttering creates disfluency practice and may increase a person’s disfluency rate…” When I was taught to ski, the very first thing I was taught to do was to fall. My ski instructor knew that I (and all of the beginners in the group) were afraid of falling. So my instructor helped to minimize my fears of falling by teaching me how to fall in a safe manner. Voluntary falling did not create a drive in my body to fall. Instead, it created a drive in my body to ski with less fear. Once I knew that I could fall safely, I was much more able and willing to concentrate on skiing. As I said in my paper, voluntary stutters will occasionally turn into real stutters. But over the long run, voluntary stuttering is about exerting control over how and when you stutter and how you feel about stuttering. The length of time a person uses voluntary stuttering is really dependent upon the specific goals and needs of the person. I wish I could be more specific, but therapy is such an individualized process that giving a timeline of any sort for using voluntary stuttering would be inappropriate. I will say that the more a client is willing to use voluntary stuttering the more worth he or she should expect to find in the tool. -----------REFERENCE: Saltuklaroglu T., Kalinowski J., Dayalu V.N., Stuart A.; Rastatter M.P. (2004). Voluntary stuttering suppresses true stuttering: A window on the speech perception–production link. Perception & Psychophysics,, Volume 66, Number 2, 1 February 2004, pp. 249-254(6)),