Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
speech production system through the auditory cortex and may reach speech-producing brain areas by
circumventing the frontocentral disconnection, enabling resynchronization of decorrelated activity.
Outside the person factors
Outside the person factors, concentrate on the context of communication and aspects other than
speech, which affect communication. These include roles and relationships, attitudes, values and
emotions as well as the quality and quantity of support. Gerda Wilson (1998) the senior therapist in
charge of the stammer courses at the Apple House said: ‘As the years rolled on, it was quite obvious
that a great deal more than ‘stammerbashing’ had to take place. What was the use of fluent speech if
the environment of the client was poor or his opinion of himself low?’ The client needs help in
rearranging parts of his life and so a holistic approach that considers both component and contextual
aspects of communication is likely to be more effective. Sage (2004) points out that the British low
context communication style, which has most information vested in words, is componential, abstracting
and logical, dealing only with what has been taken from a context and made explicit in digital (linear)
thinking ways. Therefore, as a society, we are not predisposed to value the contextual features of
communication that are bound up with the meaning of the event, in contrast to high context cultures
like Japan, which emphasize environment, attitudes, relationships, non-verbal signals such as touching,
intuition and analogue (circular) thinking. This may be the reason why our approaches to fluency have
traditionally targeted the word aspects of messages with less attention to the broader perspectives
operating in communication. Modern interventions, however, take context factors into more
consideration.
Thus, abnormal brain activity, reinforced by learned behaviour and the influences of communicative
contexts may well deliver a triple whammy for those who stammer, so making their disorder extremely
complex to unravel.
Factors in dysfluency
Previous discussion has hinted at three factors operating in dysfluency (Sage, 1998).
Predisposing factors are biological resulting in less facility in using words
Precipitating factors include upsets, illnesses or losses that activate biological weaknesses
Perpetuating factors - insecurity, stress and unsuitable demands - facilitate stammer development
Presently, we can do little about the first two factors, as we arrive in the world with a mixed bag of
parental genes and surrender to life’s ups and downs. Perpetuating factors, however, offer chances for
help and hope. There is now more co-operation between parents and professionals, so reducing chances
that stammering will become established. Therapy has taken a broader approach, in line with a greater
focus on context issues in learning (Sage, 2004), concentrating less on the speech problem and more on
a person’s relationships and interactions with others. This increases opportunities to change mental
attitudes and develops a wider range of skills (Sage, 1998). Together with a greater knowledge of the
cause of stammering, effective therapy, helps to reduce the 50% of performance relapses (Garvin-
Cullen, 1990). Relapses are common if therapy is limited to word component rather than non-verbal
context issues and there is no support following intervention (Sage, 1998).
2. A research rationale
Prins (1991) said that to change behaviour you must alter the way people think. Sage (2000)
showed how taking account of clients’ most pressing problems motivates them to achieve more
effective communication. Therefore, a study of Oxford Fluency Courses in 1998, over 32 years of their
existence, included structured interviews to elicit views from four clients who had attended a short
intensive course, with follow up opportunities, during this period. Data reveals the real issues in their
lives, which help to define future research and practice. This descriptive approach, known as
ethnography, has a characteristic ‘funnel’ structure, being progressively focused over its course. There
are two distinct components. First, the research problem is developed or transformed over time, which
then leads to clarification and delimitation of the scope and exploration of the structure. Over the
course of the study one discovers what the research is about which commonly turns out to be quite
different from the initial focus. This progression parallels Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) famous account
of grounded theory, which involves three stages:
1. An initial attempt to develop categories to illuminate data
1. An attempt to ‘saturate’ these categories with appropriate cases to demonstrate relevance
2. The development of categories into a general analytic frameworks relevant outside the setting
Grounded theory is criticized because it is clearer about the generation of theories than about their
testing and can degenerate into the empty building of categories (Silverman, 2000). At best, it allows
creative theory to be generated from good observation of a real situation in contrast to the abstracted
empiricism present in most statistical studies.
3. Research methods: a discussion of the issues
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