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From: Greg Snyder
Date: 07 Oct 2006
Time: 19:15:38 -0500
Remote Name: 207.68.248.51
Hi Chris… The quote relative to “(behavioral) incoordination within the speech motor mechanisms” is just an oversimplified distillation of a dying etiological/treatment behavioral view of stuttering. And it’s not one in which I subscribe; there was an excellent article in 1994 that pretty much killed the whole perspective. In short, those within the speech-motor perspective confused the symptoms of stuttered speech with the disorder of stuttered speech; simply stated, the paradigm had poor internal validity; subsequently their data is really uninterpretable. But with that all said—I did circulate the manuscript before it went online—and a number of trusted colleagues basically asked the same questions as you. … … … … … As far as your specific questions, it is my personal belief that the motor aspects of stuttering are a result or consequence of the disorder; it is not the disorder itself. It is my belief that the body attempts to use the motor system to essentially kick-start an error in processing occurring further upstream. … … … … And while I was able to (pretty successfully) disassociate stuttered speech from sign, that is not to say that I didn’t exhibit some stuttered sign characteristics when I was using sign-only. I can’t tell you how many times my teachers would tell me to “slow down” when signing, which seemed to help my sign precision and overall sign intelligibility. (With finger-spelling specifically.) … … … … I know of no data that looks that the neural signature of PWS in other expressive modalities; I sure would like to see it though. … … … … And relative to stuttered speech and speech apraxia, it’s tempting to wonder about it—no doubt about it. I honestly wish we knew more…