Second day of ODC

Not too much happened today. There were only sessions in the morning. I missed the first keynote speech as I was still sleeping! :-)

I gave my talk on noon. It went OK, people's feedback was positive. I was talking about findings that I made while looking at the data of the Kassel Stuttering Therapy. I looked at different aspects of the patients' data. 1) I did not find any gender bias in the data 2) Most patients were young. I did say that I did not believe that older people would stutter less. But one or two people said that the older you are the less you stutter. But I have to look at the articles. In any case, the decrease in prevalence is relatively mild and does not explain the significant drop with age. 3) I looked at the correlation of measured stuttering, self-rated stuttering, and self-rated avoidance. avoidance and self-rated were strongly correlated, and self-rated severity and measured stuttering. 4) I found that the 1-year and the 3-year data were statistically not distinguishable on paired t-tests.

Prof Euler spoke about the actual outcome study. We only found that the severity of stuttering affects the outcome, all other variables seem not significant. He even derived an equation to predict the fluency after therapy. Interestingly he found some other variables apart from severity-before in the 3 year data. But this sample has only 50 people. So when he did if for patients with 2Y data and 1Y data. There was no effect! That just shows how slippery statistics can be. If you analyse for many factors, some factors BY CHANCE will be significant!! especially for smaller samples.

During the meal and at the pub I spoke to several people. Some of them had read my blog! :-) So I am not only writing for myself!!!!! I am trying to advertise this blog as much as possible, as you can imagine. I spoke with Per Alm whose PhD work I discussed here. I also spoke to many language therapists from all over the world. Tomorrow there will be more brain-based research talks. So I am curious to know what they have to say.

Just a last note. Unfortunately, I have to say that lots of research that was presented was a bit shaky in terms of methodology and graphical presentation...