stuttering in signed languages

[dcogill at une.edu.au]

Hi Jeraldine,

I have received a reply from Prof Roger Ingham of the Department of Speech
and Hearing Sciences University of California, Santa Barbara — an
ex-Aussie who has a major reputation in stuttering research.  I didn't
forward it to the list as I thought the stuttering string had died a
natural death, but since your post has arrived (held up in SLing
Attachment Customs for a few days, I guess), here it is below (with some
non-relevant bits chopped off the start and the finish).

Can I also quickly say how much I've enjoyed the stuuttering posts since
then. And that I bet I'm not the only one for whom Maiko Villanueva's
remarks about kinaesthetic feedback made me slap my forehead and go "Oh
golly!  How could I have overlooked that! Yet I completely did overlook
it!"

Dorothea.




>...You are correct - current opinion holds that developmental stuttering
is a speech disorder and not a language disorder.  But the distinction
is certainly still contentious because, as I'm sure you know, speech
and language intersect at so many levels and in ways that are not
completely understood.  In the case of stuttering there are certainly
reports of it interfering with the playing of musical instruments and
it still continues in many cases after a laryngectomy.  I do not know
of any carefully documented accounts of it occurring during signing,
but I would not be surprised.

>In 2000 I did report a PET brain imaging study in Brain and Language
that found that the abnormal neural activations and deactivations that
are associated with stuttered speech also occur when the same
stutterers imagine they are speaking and stuttering.  More
intriguingly, just as these abnormalities normalized during induced
stutter-free speech, so they were also normalized when the stutterers
imagined they were producing fluent speech.  In other words, speech
was not necessary to produce a neural process that is now
well-established as related to stuttering.  Hence, I would find it
quite possible that same neural processes would present if a person
who signs also has a history of stuttering in his/her family.  I would
be less inclined to believe that if there were no other
stuttering-related features, for I am quite sure that signing often
includes what would correspond to normal disfluencies or production
errors.
...

Roger Ingham.




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