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From: Brian Humphrey
Date: 10/21/01
Time: 10:18:23 PM
Remote Name: 65.33.237.204
Hello Nan,
Thanks for your thorough discussion of the many factors that appear to affect both the degree of stuttering in the languages that a PWS may speak, and the degree of treatment transfer to another language. Here are some observations on three factors: age of the subject, language predominance, and order of language learning.
The subjecct discussed in my 1999 ASHA poster session was a woman in her early thirties whose predominant language was English; she was treated in English and changes were monitored in both English and Spanish. She achieved a 70% reduction in stuttering frequency in English, the treated language, while achieving a 40% reduction in Spanish, the untreated language, before withdrawing from treatment for personal reasons.
Another subject in this continuing study, in his early thirties, has been showing better transfer of fluency gains from English, the treated language, to French, the untreated language being monitored. It is possible that the differences in transfer of fluency gains may be related to a difference in language history. Unlike the first subject, this subject was not always predominant in English. He spoke mainly Arabic as a child, mainly French as a teenager, and mainly English as an adult.
Yaser Al Natour conducted a study that was strikingly similar to mine at the University of Jordan, and we presented a comparison of our studies at the 2001 Convention of the Florida Association of Speech-Language Pathologists and Audiologists (FLASHA). He treated a set of twelve-year-old twin girls in Arabic, and monitored their progress in both Arabic and English. The twins' dysfluencies were comparatively mild, but he achieved greater than 97% fluency in both languages, by treating just in Arabic.
Hopefully, the ideas and insights generated by treatment studies such as these will gain validity as case reports are added. Studies like these require time, patience, perseverance, and the good fortune of having subjects who stay with their treatment.