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From: Gunars K. Neiders
Date: 10/8/01
Time: 8:35:33 PM
Remote Name: 12.13.226.14
Steve,
I agree with you that every therapist, hopefully, already uses humor, the empirical evidence concept, logic, and pragmatic principles in their practice to help the client put their covert or overt stuttering into a realistic frame of reference. If not then I hope the therapists are learning how to incorporate these in their practice. I only meant to state that I learned these concepts from my mentor Albert Ellis. Surely you don't think that I believe he has a corner of the market on these techniques. :-) :-)
You opened up a topic of normal disfluent speakers which Van Riper discusses in his book Stuttering. If my memory serves me right it is on page 324 :-), but, since, I may have taken too many head balls in soccer:-), I can't be sure, and I am too lazy:-) to look it up in my copy of his book. As you wrote elsewhere in this conference, the SEVERITY is the operational factor in stuttering.
Labeling yourself either a "stutterer" or a PWS, Person Who Stutters, or "cured" or "recovered" is arbitrary in most instances and according to us, General Semanticists, counterproductive. I think the late and great General Semanticist Wendell Johnson would agree with me. I think of labeling as a prime example of "self profiling":-), of finding yourself guilty or anyway suspicious of nefarious deeds :-) before any evidence is gathered.
What I was suggesting that some graduate student would pick as her Master's Thesis the topic of what characterizes a speech segment as an instance of stuttering. In this study it would be best to remove the originator of the speech from that segment/instance of speech. And then we could study at what threshold with respect to say a) struggle, b) frequency, c) duration of blocks, d) classification of blocks (silent, voiced, repetition, etc.) e) obviousness of avoidances, f) unnatural prosody, and g) secondary symptom severity such as head jerks, eye blinks, unnatural or loss eye contact etc. would a typical person on the street consider this INSTANCE of speech as being stuttering. It really would not matter whether the originator of this segment/instance of speech would be a stutterer or a fluenter :-).
I think that the samples of speech YOU, personally, can produce would provide a very interesting source for this project, since you are the BEST voluntary pseudo stuttering sample provider that I have seen. This is especially outstanding since you, yourself, have never stuttered, nor have ever been a normal dysfluent speaker.
Some rhetorical questions:
1) How many stuttering instances/segments of stuttered speech makes one a stutterer or PWS?
2) Who defines a person as a stutterer of PWS? Self? Others?
3) Can one seek/benefit from stuttering therapy even if he is a normal speaker who is dysfluent?
4) Can a person be "cured" or are only West Virginia hams cured :-)? (Just a bit of levity :-), the real question is how does one define cured? By what threshold of fluency and normal prosody, by what threshold of non-arousal of feelings of anxiety, shame, or guilt about his stuttering?
Gunars
p.s. Hope to see you in New Orleans in November at the ASHA conference.