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From: Greg Snyder
Date: 13 Oct 2006
Time: 10:25:06 -0500
Remote Name: 130.74.194.57
Hi Ilia. I am intrigued by your research, and would like to know more about your methodology before I feel like I can answer any of your questions with any real degree of validity. Regarding your comorbidity data, how and when was this data collected? To me, it seems like the only real valid measurement would be to collect social anxiety data before the onset of stuttering. After developmental stuttering has set in, the person who stutters deals with the negative social consequences of socially marginalized speech. These negative societal consequences become a pretty nasty extraneous variable relative to validly deciphering the etiology of stuttered speech from a psychological perspective. Subsequently, stuttered speech and the fear of social punishment secondary to stuttered speech are two different variables- -both influencing the dependent variable (i.e., the frequency & severity of stuttered speech). … … … … My skepticism of social phobia / stuttering research is that all too often it seems that people are tempted to see a correlation and assume causality. (i.e., people stutter *because of* speech-related anxiety tension.) However, there is an ambiguous temporal procedure involved in that belief; what came first? The stuttered speech or the fear of stuttering in public? Consequently, comorbidity data, like other correlational data, concerns me in that causality cannot be inferred unless the social anxiety is detected *before* the onset of stuttering. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been documented. … … … … In short, it would be foolish to suggest that speech-related anxiety is not associated with stuttering. However, it may be scientifically safer to view the relationship as a Sequence, rather than try to infer causality from a correlated or corroborative syndrome. If one chooses to view stuttering from a psychological perspective, I would suggest: Stuttered (speech) surfaces, which creates speech-related negative social consequences. It is from these negative social consequences that social phobias may emerge; these social phobias may negatively interact with the successful control or management of (stuttered) speech. … … … … To use a few American idioms, we’ve been barking up this (psychological etiology) tree for over 70 years now. And at some point, we’re going to have to acknowledge that the emperor has no clothes, and there’s a really big elephant in the room that most everyone is trying to ignore. After 70 years of psychological-centric stuttered thinking, there has been minimal progress in our understanding or treatment of the pathology. (Embarrassingly little when compared to other pathologies from a medical model.) Given this reality, I remain skeptical relative to the premise in which your questions are asked. … … … … Relative to “social phobia signs”, I really cannot say, as I don’t pretend to research social phobias. If you could operationally define what “social phobia signs” are, then perhaps I could provide a better answer. “Stuttered Signs” are (operationally defined by me) to represent the behavioral manifestations of the stuttering phenomenon relative to signed language expressive output; it is proposed that the behavioral manifestations of the stuttering phenomenon are the body’s natural compensatory (behavioral) response to rectify (or re-initiate) expressive language output relative to the specific modality being produced. (In speech, it would be the unit of output, such as the speech gesture or syllable. In sign--I honestly do not know.) … … … … Regarding your second question, there is little descriptive data in which I have found that deals with the characteristics, nature, or “personality” of the stuttering phenomenon in other expressive modalities other than speech. I hope to be actively researching this very concept soon. … … … … Thanks for your questions, and I hope this helps,