Perspectives Regarding the Clinical Utility of a Speech Motor Perspective on Childhood Stuttering

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Re: Inferring child motor skills from adult studies

From: Anthony J Caruso
Date: 10/9/00
Time: 2:43:57 PM
Remote Name: 204.210.200.57

Comments

Hi Bob, We have chatted about this off and on over the past several years, so you probably know how I am going to respond to you thoughtful questions. First, as you know, we have recently written in detail about the pitfalls of extrapolating findings from adult research to children, particular in the area of speech motor control. Children near the age of onset of stuttering have not yet mastered their speech/language system and both there speech structure development and neural loci for the control of those structures are still developing/evolving. We need to continue to develop paradigms and approaches that are appropriate for children (i.e., minimally invasive and non-intrusive). As for 'ideal' studies, I'm afraid I don't have much experience with those *S*. Seriously, though, I think we need to develop studies with children that go beyond descriptive (atheoretical) studies. Hard to do, for a variety of reasons, but I think the effort in that direction would be well worth it. Much of what you asked about we have discussed in Caruso & Strand (1999) Clinical Management of Motor Speech Disorders in Children (Thieme Medical Publishers). One reason I mention that is because we present a model that could be used to examine the nature of disturbances associated with childhood stuttering, dysarthria and apraxia. And, I think it is important to design studies with children where there is more than 1 control group. Studies designed to have 2 or 3 groups of children performing the same task could help to clear up ambiguitiy of findings and shed light on the processes involved in (dys)fluent speech. Do you have some thoughts on this? --Tony


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