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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/20/00
Time: 2:39:32 PM
Remote Name: 129.2.25.203
I loved your work on that study, which was truly a landmark undertaking. I am not surprised that there are overlaps among the disorders, since we understand that integration of linguistic goals (such as use of voice, sounds, language) must involve some central or integrative processes. theoretically, we should find it harder to knock out individual talents than more than one! One of the concerns I now have is that some children thought to stutter are really children with expressive language formulation problems (we just saw an incredible case like that here, where the parents and teachers felt the child stuttered, but we felt VERY strongly that the problem was one of language formulation, accompanied by an extreme amount of repetition and backtracking when the kid got lost figuring out what to say. Clearly most forms of stuttering therapy are not going to help this sort of case - fluency shaping or stuttering modification or Lidcombe will not help a child who gets tangled up in his own words. Anyhow, I digress, when what I wanted to say is, YES, I agree with you, and folks who haven't read that study SHOULD. It was truly informative.
best regards, Nan