stuttering - follow-up

[Nan Ratner]

Well, I also want to clarify, which I should have done earlier, that
what I am talking about IS stuttering, NOT developmental disfluency,
which is what I presume Elena refers to. So let's set some guidelines:
stuttering will consist of, minimally, part-word repetitions, of more
than one iteration per incident, accompanied most typically by
prolongation of vowels, liquids, glides and syllabic consonants, and
most tellingly, if it is stuttering, blocks, which are fixations in
which the child appears "frozen" prior to, or during the articulation of
a segment. It is often accompanied by signs of struggle or tension, but
not necessarily awareness. If that is what the child demonstrates, it is
stuttering. The good news is that 80% of this stuff goes away. We now
have longitudinal studies that show this and also list some predictors
for recovery. 

Very few people believe in what used to be called the "continuity
hypothesis" - that stuttering is merely developmental disfluency that
got worse or didn't go away.  It appears to be a different animal
entirely, as demonstrated by the Yairi and Ambrose longitudinal work
that showed very different patterns for children's developmental
disfluency.

Nan


Nan Bernstein Ratner, Professor and Chairman
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
0100 Lefrak Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
nratner at hesp.umd.edu
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/hesp/facultyStaff/ratnern.htm
301-405-4213
301-314-2023 (fax)

>>> Elena Lieven <lieven at eva.mpg.de> 06/12/07 9:51 AM >>>
I also think that, as Nan says, this is a very typical age of onset and

may be a temporary phenomenon related to children's move from a 
relatively greater emphasis on semi-formulaic and easily produced 
utterances to a more abstract and complex grammatical system.  My 
impression is that there is more disfluency in our 3-year-old data than

in our 2-year-olds though it's not straightforward to separate 
increasing syntactic complexity from increasing utterance length - if 
indeed it makes sense to make this a clear distinction.

elena lieven

Nan Ratner wrote:

>Stuttering usually has its onset at the time you mention; 80% of it
goes
>away without intervention, although both families and children may be
>disturbed by its features before it goes away. Risk factors for
>continued stuttering include a family history of chronic stuttering.
If
>you provide me with a location for the child, I may be able to refer
to
>a good clinic that can evaluate the child and provide concrete
>recommendations for things that can be done to help the child. A
>technical book on early stuttering is the recent book by Ehud Yairi
and
>Nicoline Ambrose; there are may other more consumer-oriented
materials
>at the Stuttering Foundation of America website, and a wealth of
>information (not always carefully sorted, but usually quite reliable,
as
>the site is run by a knowledgable speech-language pathologist) at the
>StutteringHomePage.com
>
>This is an area I work in, so if the family is still concerned after
>looking at these materials, or does want a referral (the Michael
Palin
>Centre in London is excellent, and probably can make a more local
>referral), I am happy to chat off-list.
>
>Regards,
>Nan Bernstein Ratner
>(co-author of the in-press Handbook on Stuttering, sixth edition,
>Thomson-Delmar)
>
>
>
>Nan Bernstein Ratner, Professor and Chairman
>Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
>0100 Lefrak Hall
>University of Maryland
>College Park, MD 20742
>nratner at hesp.umd.edu 
>http://www.bsos.umd.edu/hesp/facultyStaff/ratnern.htm 
>301-405-4213
>301-314-2023 (fax)
>
>
>  
>