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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/5/00
Time: 11:14:17 AM
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203
In our work, we were asking whether or not young children, whether they stutter or not, hear themselves under DAF, since an older literature suggests that children are better at monitoring the speech of others than their own at a very young age. The task we used was simply labeling single words from picture cards, thus no child stuttered, to answer the first question. Auditory self-monitoring is the process by which we monitor what we are saying as we say it. Because adults do this actively, changing the relationship between what they are doing (talking) and what they are hearing (DAF) creates a mismatch that must be dealt with somehow, either by slowing, prolonging speech, etc etc. If you aren't listening to yourself much when you talk, which is more typical of very little children, no adaptive changes to speech production occur, and therefore, you would not expect any facilitating effects of the DAF, because it is not the DAF that produces the fluency, it is the REACTIONS to the DAF that does the "trick" insofar as it works in some cases (but not all). Nan