Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
On a more concrete level, the authors identify several areas in which the UB approach may
contribute to fluency research. First, the UB approach introduces an independently motivated unit of
speech analysis, the ‘slot-and-frame’ schema, which offers the prospect of accounting for the loci of
speech disfluencies. The authors also propose that the tools of the UB approach could be used to
determine whether the underlying syntactic and phonological representations of children who stutter
differ from those of children who do not stutter.
At present, however, it is difficult to see what concrete advantages would come out of adopting the
tools offered by the UB approach. In their discussion of the EXPLAN model (Howell & Au-Yeung,
2002), for example, the authors propose to replace the ‘theoretically suspicious’ phonological word
(Au-Yeung, Howell, & Pilgrim, 1998) with the ‘empirically derived and psychologically real’ slot-andframe
schema. However, as things stand, it is hard to escape the impression that the slot-and-frame
schema is but a mere notational variant of the phonological word. Similarly, the authors emphasize the
need to properly assess potential differences in syntactic and phonological representations between
children who stutter and children who do not stutter. Here again, however, the authors do little more
than tell us that such questions can be investigated using the approach they advocate. As for the
benefits of adopting the UB approach over other traditional psycholinguistic methods, convincing
evidence has yet to be offered.
In the end, what the authors manage to accomplish in their target article is to (a) present a lengthy
and detailed account of the evidence supporting their approach to language acquisition, (b) present a
short overview of research on developmental stuttering, (c) end with a series of promissory notes on the
potential virtues of their approach and its relevance to developmental stuttering, all of which remain to
be confirmed, and finally (d) gratuitously reaffirm throughout the article their dislike of ‘clumsy’
generative approaches to language and language development.
In this sense, the authors do seem to have answered the question they raise in the title of their article
‘Can the Usage-Based approach to language development be applied to analysis of developmental
stuttering?’ As for the real and much more interesting question of whether anything new can be
learned about developmental stuttering once one adopts the authors’ perspective, we still have no idea.
References
Au-Yeung, J., Howell, P., & Pilgrim, L. (1998). _Phonological words and stuttering on functions words_. Journal
of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 1019-1030.
Bloodstein, O. (1995). A handbook on stuttering (5th ed.). San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
Crystal, D. (1987). Towards a _bucket_ theory of language disability: Taking account of interaction between
linguistic levels. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 1, 7-22.
Howell, P., & Au-Yeung, J. (2002). The EXPLAN theory of fluency control and the diagnosis of stuttering_. In E.
Fava (Ed.). Current issues in linguistic theory series: Pathology and therapy of speech disorders. (pp.
75-94). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Just, M. & Carpenter, P. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory.
Psychological Review, 99, 122-149.
Savage, C., & Lieven, E. (2004). Can the Usage-Based Approach to Language Development be Applied to
Analysis of Developmental Stuttering? Stammering Research, 1, 83-100.
Starkweather, C.W. (1987). Fluency and stuttering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
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