Advancements in stuttering research continue to tell us what we already know…
Read an interesting article that just confirms what I’ve been telling my students for years. And it’s funny to read where the authors are still a little clueless. Exhibit A: “Although stuttering is regarded as a speech-specific disorder, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that subtle abnormalities in the motor planning and execution of non-speech gestures exist in stuttering individuals.” Sorry–been there, done that. Stuttering isn’t a speech disorder; it’s documented to exist in any number of expressive linguistic modalities.
In any event, the abstract concludes with “These results demonstrated that neural activation differences in PWS are not speech-specific.” And that’s a good start. What we’ll find is that people will begin to see stuttering (the pathology) as a chronic neurological state. Stuttered speech (i.e., behavioral manifestation to the stuttered neural state) will be differentiated from the stuttering pathology (i.e., chronic neural state). Not only that, but we’ll begin to pay attention to the stuttering phenomenon in any number of other expressive modalities, if not in select motor acts (using the BGCT). Hopefully, the field of SLP and stuttering researchers will take off the blinders and see that the word “stuttering” is not sufficiently precise; there is the stuttered nerual state, and the behavioral act of stuttering (which is the observable manifestation of the neural state).
