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From: Hans-Georg Bosshardt
Date: 14 Oct 2005
Time: 10:22:58 -0500
Remote Name: 134.147.64.23
Your question has a very intersting implication which is certainly true in one sense but which is at least incomplete in another sense. In their daily life stuttering persons experience the highlights and frustrations of their speech and self presentation, and they are confronted with a more or less supporting and sometimes cruel environment. In this sense stuttering persons are experts about their own stuttering and its impact on their own life. Stuttering persons are also experts in evaluating the consequences of therapies on their own life. This is the reason why in the history of the development of therapy techniques stuttering persons have made very important contributions to the development of new therapy techniques, to the refinement of existing ones, etc. However, I have serious doubts whether this expertise also covers a knowledge about the causes of stuttering and about new, until now unexplored useful therapy techniques. Imagine that we make an inquiry about the special tactics which help stuttering persons to improve their speech or verbal forms of self-presentation. It could be very interesting to see whether at least some of these manoeuvers differ from the commonly used slowing down, breath management, mental concentration, thought and emotion control. However, the risk is very high that we end up with a long list of rather nonsensical suggestions - the history of therapy techniques is full of examples and I am rather sceptical whether it is helpful to prolong this list. The major reason for me to be sceptical is that neither disfluent nor fluent speaker do have good intuitions about the cognitive, emotional, and motor processes involved in speaking. Having said this, I must admit that in individual stuttering therapies I always systematically explore the individual resources and to find out how they can be used or integrated in therapy. In summary, I am somewhat ambivalent against your suggestion. Stutterers have some privileged knowledge and experiences which makes it absolutely indispensible to carefully listen and understand what they have to say about their own speech, therapy, and therapy effects. This is particularly true if they tell, for example, about the ineffectiveness of therapy techniques in certain situations. However, if it comes to other issues as for example about the effectiveness of a therapy technique, not for oneself, but for a group of people, about cognitive, motor and neurological processes involved in speech and fluency, then it is better not to rely on anybodies' personal intuitions - irrespective of whether she/he stutters or not.