The Why and the How of Voluntary Stuttering

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Re: Practicing voluntary stuttering

From: Andreas Starke, Germany
Date: 12 Oct 2005
Time: 15:35:49 -0500
Remote Name: 84.142.250.240

Comments

Hi Jodi and Peter, I'd like to comment. I'm quite sure that Jodi has a point in what she writes. That voluntary stuttering creates disfluency practice may not exactly be the problem. I don't believe that v.s. can become automatized, but something close to it. Stuttering of any kind, real or imitated, can worsen the motor set for fluent speech that same way like smooth speech (some varieties are more powerful than others) can improve the motor set for fluent speech so much that longer periods of (unvoluntary) fluent speech result. I'd like to call this an autocorrelation of speech fluency. In terms of the motor set (unvoluntary and voluntary) disfluent speech create stuttered speech in PWS and (unvoluntary and voluntary) fluent speech create normal speech in PWS. I have very impressive video recordings to show that, no controlled data though - it would be a very valuable piece of information if somebody could show this objectively. Therefore, if stuttering really was nothing else than a motor problem, strict avoidance of all kinds of irregular speech movements could be a wise choice. But: We all know that it's not. I strongly believe that v.s. is the most powerful tools in stuttering therapy for all the reasons that I named in this 6 years old paper: http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad2/papers/starke.html


Last changed: 10/24/05