Stuttering Theories Flashcards
When a theory explains THESE THINGS well, it can lead to effective treatment…
Why a person stutters on some words and not others, or in some situations and not others, and why a stutterer does the things that they do when they stutter.
Orton-Travis Brain Theory
Lack of hemisphere dominance.
Observed stuttering in left-handed students who were being converted to right-handed.
The change was suspected to cause disruption in speech and bring about stuttering.
Therapy involved converting back to left-handedness.
Geschwind-Galaburda Brain Theory
Left hemisphere underdeveloped in utero due to elevated testosterone levels, leading to right hemisphere dominance.
Webster Brain Theory
Normal localization of speech and language in the left hemisphere, but the supplementary motor area (SMA), is especially vulnerable to disruption by activities in other areas of the brain.
SMA is highly involved in the initiation, planning, and sequencing of motor activities.
The Brain - Primary Motor Function
Isolated and specific movements.
The Brain - Premotor Cortex Function
Preparation of movement.
Anticipatory postural adjustments.
The Brain - Supplementary Motor Area
Sequencing of movements.
Van Riper Timing Theory
“When a person stutters on a word, there is a temporal disruption of the simultaneous and successive programming of muscular movements required:
- to produce one of the word’s integrated sounds, or
- to emit one of its syllables appropriately or
- to accomplish the precise linking of sounds and syllables that constitutes its motor pattern”
Kent Timing Theory
Supported the view of stuttering being a disorder in timing – attributing it to the language centers for PWS being located in the right hemisphere.
“Because the left hemisphere is specialized for processing brief, rapidly changing events such as those needed for fine motor control of verbal output”
Kent Timing Theory: Since the right hemisphere regulates a variety of negative emotions, the timing aspects of speech are arranged so that they are:
(1) less efficient than those of nonstutterers and
(2) vulnerable to interference by right-hemisphere activity during increased emotion” (p. 92).
Webster argues that this does not account for the different manifestations of overt behaviors.
Nielson Reduced Capacity for Internal Modeling Theory
PWS are deficient in using inverse internal models. That is – an inability to develop mental models between speech sounds and motor commands.
Overt behaviors would then result from insufficient transformations of sensory targets.
“repetitions or prolongations may occur if a speaker is
attempting to push ahead with speech while his brain is
still planning the syllables that follow and how to link
them with the initial sound”
Language Production Theory
During speech, we use auditory feedback and internal
feedback to monitor productions for semantic, syntactic,
and phonological errors.
The Covert Repair Hypothesis
States that typical disfluencies and stuttering are on the same spectrum and stuttering results from more repairs needing to be made in the assembly of the utterance.
Namely, stuttering is the repair of phonological errors.
Kolk and Postma lay out the evidence supporting their
views that…
the benefits of a slower speech rate on stuttering are derived from the greater amount of time that stutterers have for phonological encoding.
Perkins, Kent and Curlee (1991) proposed stuttering to
result from a dyssynchrony between two aspects of
language:
(1) the paralinguistic (e.g., prosody) and
2) structure (e.g., semantics, syntax, and phonology
