SFA RESEARCH FALL 2023
WHY WE NEED
A BROADER VIEW OF STUTTERING By Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D., University of Maryland, College Park
If you remember your original “intro” text to communication sciences and disorders, it probably was divided into broad sections, such as speech, language and hearing. Indeed, that was the actual title of my own intro text. In such texts, stuttering was always covered in the section on Speech Disorders.
Separating speech, language and hearing was conventional for many years, including old record keeping of practicum and classroom experiences for ASHA certification, and is an example of what is now called “modularity,” the assumption that an ability or skill is encapsulated in some way, cognitively or even physically, as in a discrete area of the brain.
But few scientists these days are convinced of the modularity of speech, language or hearing – these skills overlap in major ways in everyday function. They are also increasingly documented as having impacts that overlap within individual disorders, such as stuttering.
Is stuttering a speech disorder?
Certainly, it involves speech. One hears the behavioral features of stuttering, which are present in the speech signal. But increasingly, stuttering has been shown to have features that intersect with language: recent literature shows rather compellingly that children who stutter tend to have less good language skills, that adults who stutter find some language tasks more difficult than their non- stuttering peers do, and that both adults and children who stutter appear to process language differently than fluent peers, as measured by brain responses, even when passively listening to well-formed and poorly formed utterances.
Some studies suggest that the strength of language abilities at first diagnosis may predict which children recover spontaneously, with less good language skills associated with a risk for persistence. As in many other disorders, being diagnosed with one communication impairment, such as stuttering, carries elevated risk for having a second disorder, such as language or phonological delay/impairment.
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SFA RESEARCH: A BROADER VIEW
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