[Next]
From: Gunars
Date: 10/10/00
Time: 7:53:27 PM
Remote Name: 12.13.226.15
Hans,
This truly impressive, fascinating, and needed research I think will shed some light on the mysterious and murky understanding of the evolution of stuttering, the spontaneous remission, and possibly how to demarcate between the individuals who are at risk of becoming chronic stutterers and those that are only experiencing a passing developmental stage that mimics stuttering, those that outgrow stuttering, those that while exhibiting real stuttering can be helped by present day treatment regimens.
I hope that enough data is taken and preserved to allow for forthcoming generation of graduate students the ability to "massage" the data to either disprove or prove their as yet not conceived hypothesis.
My questions to you are:
1) Are any cognitive data on the parents' mind set about how they perceive and how they evaluate their children's speech taken?
2) Are any data taken of how the child reacts to his speech?
3) Are there any other demographic data taken?
4) Do you have any other interesting "hunches" to add with respect to the study that may, as yet, not be validated by the data?
I must congratulate you on adopting the Smith and Kelly's multifaceted model of stuttering as a starting point.
A couple more philosophical questions:
5) Do you think that the study will suffer much from Heisenberg's Principle as it applies to social science (Heisenberg stated that in Quantum Mechanics the very act of measuring introduces uncertainties...)?
6) Do you think that the Hawthorne effect (where focusing attention to a variable whether in a positive or a negative way tends to improve "performance" of that variable) is being introduced in some way?
Gunars