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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/10/00
Time: 11:18:05 PM
Remote Name: 64.12.105.36
Thanks for some interesting observations. The work I have done actually tried to see if either comprehension or production were more impaired relative to one another in children who stuttered. We were thinking, as you are, I believe, that an imbalance between either comprehension or production abilities could produce disfluencies. Unfortunately, this hypothesis is difficult to test in very young children at the age that stuttering starts, because the available tests are not comparable - that is, the expressive and receptive tests are not normed equivalently, so they can't really be compared. For example, our expressive test seemed to have more lenient norms than our receptive test, which produced some nonsensical results if "paired", that a child could say more than they knew, percentile-wise.
So, I think your hypotheses are interesting, but our data really can't answer them. Your observations about the cognitively impaired children you have seen are quite provocative as well. I really appreciate your comments.
best regards,
Nan