Announcing 'Stammering Research' - Stammering Research - UCL

Stammering Research. Vol. 1.
a subset who had a qualtitatively different speech processing system from the start, but which was
obscured by the ‘floor’ effect of normal developmental disfluency; 3) All CWS have a qualitatively
different speech processing system from the start, but some genuinely recover with age and some do
not. In our article, we proposed that the EXPLAN model of Howell and Au Yeung (2002) could be
combined with the UB approach to provide a useful theory of developmental stuttering, but of course
this is only one possibility. There are other explanations that could also be valid. For example, even if
our approach is part of the answer, there is, as both replies indicate, clearly going to be an interaction
between whatever linguistic representation the child has and how this interacts with speed of access in
production.
It may be, as Anderson and Musolino (2004) state, that our proposal appears not radically different
to that of the ‘phonological’ or ‘prosodic’ word and we may well not have done sufficient justice to the
developing research in this field as Demuth (2004) states. However, what we were attempting to
contrast was the difference between our ‘item-based frames’ and the notion of phonological words as
assembled by attaching function words to their heads at the phonological level. There is room here for
a fruitful dialogue particularly in relation to the work on early syllable development and the emergence
of grammatical morphemes cited by Demuth.
What remains finally are the two critical questions that must inform the study of language
development and, we would argue, the attempt to understand the causes of stuttering: (1) the nature of
children’s linguistic representations and how they change (2) a developmental model of language
production. For us, as UB theorists, these two are much less separate than they are for theorists from
other persuasions.
References
Anderson, J. D., & Musolino, J. (2004). How useful is the Usage Based Approach to Stuttering
Research. Stammering Research, 1, 295-296.
Demuth, K. (2004). Production approaches to Stuttering. Stammering Research, 1, 297-298.
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. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 75–94
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.
Valian, V. (1986). Syntactic categories in the speech of young children. Developmental Psychology, 22, 562-579.
Valian, V. (1991). Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition,
40, 21-81.
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