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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/6/00
Time: 10:14:45 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.51
Dear Jennifer,
I'll take a stab at your first question. First of all, there is a neurological basis for anything any animal does. I'm sure you know this, so there is no need to elaborate that point further.
I may be wrong, but I assume you mean, "Is there any known relationship between a neurological etiology and spontaneous recovery in stuttering?" I am sure there is, but I don't know what the necessary parameters and interactions are. Others may be aware of specific data on this issue, but my experience is that the more likely there is other evidence of neurological involvement (e.g., oral-motor impairments, fine motor incoordination, sensory-perceptual difficulties), the less likely the young stuttering child is to recover without therapy--or even with therapy for that matter. By contrast, if a child has no other symptoms but stuttering and the onset and early course were what Van Riper would call Track I stuttering (accounting for about half of all stutterers), then the likelihood of spontaneous recovery seems to be better.
I must hasten to add two things. First, as Roger Ingham pointed out years ago, there is probably no such thing as "spontaneous" recovery alone. Nearly everyone who stutters has been given advice, has tried various things on his/her own, and so on. What "spontaneous recovery" means really is that the child recovers without formal therapy. Second, the etiology of most stuttering (even for those in Track I) is most likely related to some sort of subtle discoordination in the mechanisms of breathing, phonating, and articulating as they function in speech. If one were to oversimplify, this would suggest more of a physiological (e.g., "neurological") basis for the stuttering than psychological or learning. So from this perspective, there will always be a neurological basis for spontaneous recovery.
Tough question that really cannot be answered with certainty at this time in my opinion.
Hope this helps.
Ken