stuttering in signed languages

[dcogill at une.edu.au]

Hi there,

thanks so much to Donald, Debbie, Ingvild, Sarah, Theresa and also Jenny
Webster, from whom I've just received permission to add her post to the
general pool - as follows -

> Hi Dorothea:
> In the first BSL course I took several years ago, there was a hearing
woman who stuttered in her speech, and was excited to learn BSL because
she thought it would give her a way to communicate without stuttering.
Unfortunately, she did stutter (or what the British call 'stammer') in
BSL
> as well.  She dropped out of the course after about a year.  Her hands
would shake when she signed, and she would have a lot of false starts -
really similar to vocal stuttering.
> Best wishes
> Jenny Webster
> Research associate / PhD student
> University of Central Lancashire
> Preston, UK

 So here are already six examples of stuttering-like patterns in signing,
or at the very least accompanying speech+signing. Donald Grushkin and
Sarah both describe signers who had blinking and twitching during the
stuttering too, so typical of many speech stutterers. Plus there's a
thesis that adds more (though unfortunately due to the data-gathering
method there were no individual cases that I can add to the pool here,
just a conclusion that 'stuttering happens for signers too'). It's
certainly enough to make one reluctant to keep happily repeating the
statement that "stuttering is a speech problem, not a language problem" -
though I don't know what one WOULD positively say instead.

Just thinking about possible scenarios, in an effort to figure out what
one would expect to see from a given underlying cause, and how different
scenarios would fit the posted examples - just having a little speculate,
in other words...

certainly for most of us on slling-list, the most interesting scenario
would be, stuttering is something that affects LANGUAGE, before it gets
associated with any particular motor system.  The only case in our
mini-pool (wading pool? :-)) of shared potential cases here that wouldn't
fit that would be Theresa Smith's possible Californian man; someone
doesn't stutter in ASL even though he stutters in English. And we could
say, hypothetically, "well, for him, a late learner and hearing person,
perhaps his ASL is not full and grammatical and fluent enough to be really
mentally coded by him as language - whereas conversely, in Jenny Webster's
stuttering English speaker learning BSL, we could hypothesise that she's
thinking in English still, and this is jamming her signed production, just
as stuttering jams speech-accompanying gesture too, according to David
McNeill (the gesture chap at Chicago U)." But Donald Grishkind's Gallaudet
student who stuttered while simultaneously signing and speaking would fit
OK, and so would Ingvild Roald's chap who even 'stuttered' when typing on
the computer.

At the other extreme, there's a very boring possible alternative
scenario(well, boring for most of us, I would suppose). I'm ashamed to say
this only occurred to me after I posted my initial enquiry; what if, yes,
people stutter in signed languages, but they actually 'stutter' in all
sorts of movement patterns?  Then it's not a language thing, not a speech
thing, not a sign thing, but a general 'jamming up' of motor movements
that happens to some people - perhaps, just in some class of their rapid,
highly -rehearsed, complex motor movements, the class of movement that's
affected varying from person to person? Deborah Chen Pilcher, in that
thesis you referred me to, Geoff Whitebread mentions in passing a case of
someone who had stutter-like symptoms on playing the flute!  Very rapid,
highly-complex movement....

If this is the case - if one can have a knitting-stutter, or a
crochet-stutter, or a piano-stutter (and the only reason we don't usually
is because people with the problem don't continue with trying to knit!) -
then you'd think that people researching stuttering would know of the
phenomenon. I will try to find out, and if I get an intelligible reply
from a stutter-researcher, I will report back. Meanwhile, though, fingers
crossed it's not true. The first scenario is so much more interesting.

Dorothea.






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