[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Greg Snyder
Date: 11 Oct 2006
Time: 14:50:02 -0500
Remote Name: 130.74.194.57
Hi Chelsea. You wrote: [I was wondering how often do these events need to occur to be considered a person who stutters?] This is an interesting question in that it has no “safe” answer. A true academic elite would suggest that more data is needed before such a diagnostic operational definition can be responsibly made. And that may be true. But in all honesty, if the stuttered phenomenon exists consistently across modality, then your question can also be asked relative to the speech modality. How many disfluencies does a person need to produce to be a ‘stutterer?’. This question is akin to the age-old quest to find out exactly how many licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie-roll tootsie pop. (The world may never know…) (This was an ad back in the ‘70s.) I would argue that the answer will not be found in frequency, but rather characteristics of stuttered event or disfluency. And this concept really attacks our beliefs (and ignorance) as to what the stuttering behavior is--and if the stuttering behavior represents the stuttered pathology itself. (And this is a massive question unto itself.) So in short, I might be tempted to suggest, w/o the benefit of any real data, that a diagnostic indicator of stuttered sign isn’t the frequency of the moments, but rather if there is a loss of control within expressive production.