    |
|
Stories:
Fractured Fluency
Fractured Fluency
What do actor James Earl Jones, athlete Bo Jackson and singer Carly Simon have in common? Besides being famous and successful, all have battled stuttering.
Stuttering affects some three percent of children in the United States, most of whom develop it between the ages of two and five. The majority of these children eventually overcome the condition on their own, but scientists are not sure how. Nor do they understand exactly why kids begin stuttering in the first place.
A researcher in MU's School of Health Professions is searching for answers to at least one part of the mystery by examining whether language skills and stuttering might develop in tandem.
"We are looking to see how stuttering changes as a child accomplishes specific language milestones, and whether changes in language and stuttering over time can help us predict which children are likely to grow out of the disorder," says Stacy Wagovich, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Science and Disorders, and an associate editor of the Journal of Fluency Disorders. "We believe that children's early language skills might uncover something about how their stuttering will progress over time."
In the study, Wagovich worked with research collaborators Mary Ann Scheneman, clinical instructor for MU's Department of Communication Science and Disorders, and Nancy Hall, associate professor and department chair from the University of Maine. She says the investigators followed a group of children between the ages of two and five for one year, examining each child once a month to analyze how language development and stuttering evolved together. For example, when a child's vocabulary showed a marked increase, the researchers took note and examined how the child's stuttering changed alongside the vocabulary spurt.
Not surprisingly, some of the children in the study seemed to recover during the year of monitoring without requiring treatment. Examining the relationship between language development and stuttering in these children will be especially important, Wagovich says, because the investigation might yield patterns that could predict recovery in other children.
"It's not that speech-language pathologists wouldn't offer any services to children who appear on the path to recovery," Wagovich says. "Rather, we'd monitor the children or offer them an indirect form of treatment instead of full-scale therapy. The predictors would also tell us which children need to enter into direct treatment with a speech-language pathologist."
Wagovich says she and her collaborators are now in the data analysis portion of their investigation, but that even after completing their work much more study will be needed. "There are a lot of core questions about stuttering that have not yet been answered," Wagovich says.
|
|
Published by the Office of Research.
©2006 Curators of the University of Missouri. Click here to contact the editor.