by Kenneth O. St. Louis, Ph.D.
Kenneth O. St. Louis, Ph.D., is a professor of speech-language pathology in
the WVU Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology. He received a
1998-1999 Benedum Distinguished Scholar Award, and expressed these ideas
originally in his Benedum Lecture presented in April 1999.
Unfinished Stories of Stuttering
I have several birthday cards on my office door that were sent to me over the years by John Ahlbach, former director of the National Stuttering Project. The NSP is the largest self-help organization for stutterers in this country. One card quotes a stutterer who says, "When people ask me if I have stuttered all my life, I always tell them, 'Not yet.'"
Reared on a cattle and sheep ranch in the Rocky Mountains in the 1940s and '50s, I attended a one-room school through the elementary grades. I have stuttered ever since I can remember. My mother said that my brother, who was 15 months older than I, stuttered, and I imitated everything he said and did. He quit stuttering, and I didn't.
My uncle stuttered, and so did my father when he was young. There were no speech therapy services in remote northwestern Colorado then. I remember vaguely being taken to the big city of Denver as a young child by my mother, who was seeking advice on what might be done about my stuttering. She was told, "Ignore it, and it will go away," based on the then-current theory that stuttering was caused by overreactions of parents to normal child disfluencies. My parents tried to ignore my stuttering, but it did not go away.
After receiving speech therapy, finally, at the University of Wyoming during a summer residential program when I was 16 and in high school in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, I decided to become a speech-language pathologist. I entered the speech pathology program at Colorado State University as a student, but also received speech therapy in the university's speech clinic, where I became quite fluent. Since that time, stuttering has not been a significant problem for me, except when I was speaking a foreign language—Turkish—in the Peace Corps.
During my entire career as a speech-language pathologist, most of my research has addressed the problem of stuttering. Recently, I began collecting and analyzing individual stories of stutterers from unstructured, tape-recorded interviews. Following are two excerpts from these interviews regarding the cause of the mysterious disorder.
The first is an account from a 35- year-old male who thought his stuttering had a psychological cause: "The time that I started stuttering, it was probably around the time . . . my father came back from the Vietnam War in like 1967, '68. And I was probably five, six years old, and for . . . probably half of my early childhood . . . my father was gone. And being a Marine Corps officer, you know, I'm sure I saw him then as being a strict father figure, you know, an authoritative figure. And . . . that may have had some impact."
The second is from an 18-year-old high school student who, in his own way, probably knew that his problem had a physiological base.
Question: "What's it feel like when you first start to stutter?" Response: "Well, the brain says, 'Don't wanna say that word.' When the brain says 'don't wanna say that word,' you don't say that word. That's the brain for you. If he don't want you to say that word, you just don't say that word."
In fact, the cause of stuttering is most likely a subtle physiological problem involving the coordination of breathing, voicing, and pronunciation. It is, however, often triggered by stress and other psychological events. Stuttering often occurs as an individual's only speech disorder, but in a surprising number of cases, other problems coexist with it. One such disorder is "cluttering." Unlike what happens while a person is stuttering, clutterers often have very rapid or irregular speaking rates and very little awareness of their disfluency.
In the early 1980s, I began doing some exploratory research in cluttering and found that very little was known about this "orphan" of speech-language pathology. One study always leads to others, and, as a result of a number of research studies carried out here at WVU, I have become fairly well known for my work in this disorder, although the disorder is still poorly understood.
I have also carried out considerable research on public and professional attitudes toward stuttering. Recently, I found, for example, that experienced speech-language pathologists find stuttering their least favorite disorder to treat, partly explaining the difficulty some stutterers—or parents of young stutterers—face in trying to obtain therapy.
Clinicians have cited lack of training and experience as significant reasons for their insecurity about working with stuttering, although it is likely there are other subtle reasons as well, such as an unwillingness to be responsible if the stuttering client does not become fluent. I am particularly pleased to have been instrumental in a recent initiative to standardize and demystify some of the confusing terminology in our field of fluency disorders.
Currently, in addition to the ongoing work on stories of stutterers, I have inaugurated a collaborative research initiative to develop an instrument to assess public beliefs and sensitivity toward stuttering in communities and countries throughout the world. The founder's meeting of a task force to design the research met in Morgantown on April 9-11, 1999.
I hope this will be the first project of an International Stuttering Research Institute, a dream I have had for many years.
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