who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

360physical anthropological point of view for long eight hours. It was during ourconversation on that exciting evening, that an idea came to my mind.“Valeri Pavlovich”, I told him, “What about stuttering? If some humanpopulations shifted to speech earlier than others, they might have less stutteringindividuals in the population”.It was about three years after that memorable evening discussion in ValeriAlexeev’s apartment that I was checking into the Moscow hotel as a participant in theInternational Conference on Speech Pathology. During these three years I was extremelylucky that the leading Russian expert on speech pathology, the head of the MoscowFederal Centre of Speech Pathology, Viktor Sklowsky, became very interested in thepossible links between choral singing and stuttering. He invited me to his clinic on July14 th and 21 st , 1989, checked their records and was impressed to find out that they actuallydid not have any natives of the Central Asian republics, despite the fact that as the centralMoscow clinic, they had a great number of patients from every corner of the SovietUnion, including international patients. Then he and one of his leading researchers,Tatiana Vizel, discussed the information that was apparently brought to their attention byone of their employees, a Russian speech pathologist who visited China some time ago.According to her information, there were no stutterers and no speech pathologists inChina. This was all interesting, but a long and serious research program was needed tocheck all these anecdotal bits of information. It was important to check (1) whether therewas a difference between different populations in the prevalence of stuttering, and (2)whether this difference was statistically significant. Sklowsky invited me to theInternational Conference on Speech Pathology in October and asked me to deliver a talkduring the last session of the conference on the 19 th October.It was after my talk that some of the international guests, mostly speechpathologists from England and the USA, talked to me and gave me the excitinginformation I could not get anywhere in Moscow or Soviet Union. Let us not forget thatthe Soviet Union was effectively cut off from the western world during the Communistperiod, and even the widely known books of Charles van Riper or Oliver Bloodstein wereinaccessible to Russian speech pathologists. This conference was one of the first majoroccasions when Western speech pathologists met their Russian colleagues.Before we discuss the available information on the stuttering prevalence indifferent human populations, let me explain the nature of the possible link between thestuttering prevalence and our model of the asynchronous model of the speech origins.The actual logic behind my suggestion that some populations must have a smallernumber of stuttering individuals than others is quite simple:• Stuttering is the legacy of our evolutionary past. Humans stutter becausearticulated speech was the last major acquisition in human evolution. We stutter becausethe time span after our ancestors started speaking is relatively small in evolutionaryterms.• The evolutionary pressure for fluent articulated speech on individuals in humansociety is obvious. According to special literature, stuttering can cause social withdrawal,loneliness, and causes a minor reduction of the reproductive success of the stuttererpopulation in comparison to the non-stuttering population. Viewed in evolutionary terms,this could be one of the reasons why stuttering is reducing with every century and