Interactions between fluency and language

[Next]


Re: Brava! We need more longitudinal studies etc.

From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/10/00
Time: 11:11:11 PM
Remote Name: 64.12.105.36

Comments

Thanks, Gunars, for your typically interesting comments. Let me take them one at a time (if I can remember them!) 1. Do I think that environmental demands play a role in the precipitation of stuttering. At this point, I would have to say, No. My background is actually in environmental input to the language acquisition process in children, so I have done some of this work with stuttering children and their families. At this point, I do not believe that parents of stuttering children place them under atypical levels of linguistic demand. Stacy Silverman and I have an article which will appear any day now in JSLHR which shows parents of stuttering children to be well-attuned to them, and a companion article in review at the same journal by Stephanie Miles, working in my labs, shows no behaviors that we could interpret as linguistic (or other) demand on the very young stuttering children we saw. I appreciate the Demands and Capacities Model, but as I have said elsewhere, and repeat in a note to appear in Journal of Fluency Disorders (in press), the model needs to be more constrained and testable than it is now. I personally do not favor a model in which any unbounded number of demands or capacity limitations can produce stuttering, because such a model is inherently unfalsifiable. 2. Your second question asks whether linguistic skills are environmentally dependent. Chomskians and the social-interactionists have been battling this one for decades. At this point, it appears that some aspects of language are highly dependent on environmental input, such as vocabulary and pragmatics (use of language in socially appropriate ways). The evidence for syntax is murkier, with the caveat that the more parents talk to children and the more sophisticated the language children hear, the more progress they appear to make in early language development. This is one of the reasons why I do not personally favor recommendations for parents to simplify language to stuttering children, who seem to be a little more fragile in their linguistic skills to start with. 3. Can stress inhibit language development? I honestly don't know an answer to this. I think the answer will depend upon how stress manifests itself in a situation. If family members cannot take the time to interact with their children or encourage their language, I suppose it could. But you have asked an interesting question, and I don't think anyone has investigated this specifically.

Thanks again for your great questions. It is always fun to chat with you.

best, Nan


Last changed: September 12, 2005