Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
AUTHORS’ RESPONSE TO CONTINUING COMMENTARIES
Can the Usage-Based Approach to Language Development be
Applied to Analysis of Developmental Stuttering?
C. Savage 1 and E. Lieven 2
1 Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower St., London WC1E 6BT,
England
c.savage@ucl.ac.uk
2 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
lieven@eva.mpg.de
Abstract. The authors offer a response to commentaries by Julie Anderson & Julien Musolino and Katherine
Demuth. They first clarify their position and then address the issues raised. The authors acknowledge that they
do not provide conclusive answers, but they suggest that their paper provides an opportunity to open a dialogue
among child language and childhood stuttering researchers that includes the contributions of the UB approach.
Key Words: Usage-Based Approach, slot-and-frame schema, phonological word.
We were pleased to receive responses from Anderson & Musolino and Demuth to our article
(Savage & Lieven, 2004). Both raise important issues which need to be addressed. After briefly
clarifying our position, we attempt to address the major issues raised, but we are certainly far from
being able to give definitive answers.
The Usage-Based (UB) approach considers abstract representations as developing out of usage.
Initially, representations are local and lexically-specific (i.e. not abstract). These representations remain
available while, during development, more complex and more abstract representations build up. A
child’s early linguistic representations may constitute very lexically-specific slot-and-frame patterns,
that cut across the abstract syntactic categories of syntactic theory, for example if want and to are fused
together in ‘wanna X’. Determining what these representations are is an empirical issue, not a linguistic
one. In so far as they do not vary between speakers this will result from the lexical statistics of the
spoken language that children hear. In so far as they vary between speakers, this will depend on
particular properties of the input that children hear and what they as individuals take from it. Our
position is that the empirical evidence provides more support for this approach than for the idea that
children possess abstract linguistic representations from the outset of language development. In
addition, the evidence suggests that while different aspects of children’s linguistic representations start
to generalise and become more abstract at different points in time, there is a major change in the
representation of argument structure around the end of the third year. Here we are indeed at odds with a
Generativist approach. From a UB perspective competence and performance are not radically distinct,
as they are in Generativist theory. Anderson and Musolino (2004) are wrong, however, in suggesting
that competence accounts within the Generativist tradition have nothing to say about performance.
Whatever one’s view on whether they should have something to say, there is a long and interesting
literature of attempts to account for performance facts in terms of competence theory (notably, for
example, Valian’s 1986, 1991 performance limitations theory).
Our article was an exploration of the possibility that the UB approach might have something to
offer to the understanding of stuttering. As we understand it, the evidence suggests that when young
children stutter they tend to do so on function words, whereas adults stutter on content words. We
suggested that this might be due to the different nature of the linguistic representations that young
children have compared to those of adults (less paradigmatic and more syntagmatic would be one way
of thinking of it). The evidence also suggests that stuttering tends to onset at around 3;0, around the
time when we suggest that children are moving from item-based usage to more abstract usage.
As a stand alone hypothesis, the UB theory is incomplete. Of course we recognise that a full
explanation for stuttering will need to account for its persistence into adulthood for some speakers and
for the fact that not all children are diagnosed as having a stutter. However, if there is an increase in
disfluency by most children around the age of 3;0, then the question is why this persists for some
children and not for others. We were attempting to suggest where such an increase in disfluency might
come from and thus to shift the question to asking how it persists and whether this relates to the nature
of the linguistic representations that children who continue to stutter have. To be specific, there are
three possible explanations for the high recovery rate for childhood stuttering: 1) All CWS represent
the most disfluent end of a continuum of normal disfluency and their stuttering only persists into
adulthood if a further change in their speech abilities occurs during adolescence (i.e. the EXPLAN
model, Howell & Au Yeung, 2002); 2) CWS fall into two groups, with those who later recover
representing the disfluent end of the normal fluency curve and those whose stutter persists representing
299