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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 08 Oct 2006
Time: 20:25:42 -0500
Remote Name: 71.252.204.114
Hi Molly, ..... Thank you for your kind words. ..... Regarding technologies for stuttering, that's an interesting question. The simple answer is no. The real - much more complex answer - is when I was in therapy in the 1950's (when the earth's crust was still cooling, ha, ha, ha!), there WERE no technologies for stuttering unless you consider a metronome a technology! <grin> ..... However when I was at Purdue University in about 1960, I took a speech pathology class from Joe Sheehan (in the early years before he became an icon in the field of stuttering) because both Joe and I were interested in techie stuff. (And to be honest, because the girls in Joe's class were the best looking girls at Purdue!) I was an electrical engineering student (a true geek), and Joe and I experimented with a very early version of a delayed auditory feedback machine using a reel-to-reel tape recorder with two recording and playback heads, one fixed, and the other movable. We discovered that my speech became nearly fluent at a delay of about 40 milliseconds while it destroyed the speech of my fluent classmates. We had great fun with that phenomena. <grin> But it was totally impractical because the machine weighed nearly 100 pounds! As far as I know Joe never pursued that technology. And I dropped out of anything to do with stuttering until about 1983 when I joined the NSA. And shortly thereafter I joined Toastmasters and was never again really interested in improving my FLUENCY. I worked on my COMMUNICATION skills instead. ..... I have watched many other people who stutter use those devices with varying degrees of success. My good friends Marty Jezer (may God rest his soul) and Alan Badmington who has a paper in this ISAD conference both used the old Edinburgh Masker which worked FOR THEM, but that white noise would have driven me crazy! ..... Those devices have never really interested me anyway. I got sick of trying to chase the fluency god in the 1050's. And those devices (developed in the 80's and 90's) only tended to increase your fluency (if they worked at all) and I simply wasn't interested in pursuing that. Communication is where the action is. Fluency is just not that important. ..... Did this answer your question? ..... Good luck in school, Molly. I wish you the very best! ..... Russ