Friday, April 14, 2006

List of unsolved issues

I am currently editing a debate between Scott Yaruss and Mark Onslow. I want to share with you some of the questions that they have raised and are still unanswered by research.

Mark asked the following questions:

Why do repeated movements predominate at the onset of stuttering?

Why can stuttering be intractable for a lifetime?

Why do those who stutter have problems with tapping finger sequences?

Why do those who stutter have the problem while playing wind instruments?



Scott Yaruss has given an even longer list of questions with references. (Please note that especially the references are "from the top of his head")

Why does stuttering behavior start in children at a time of rapid expansion in linguistic, motoric, and temperamental aspects of their development (see the work of Conture, Yairi, and many others)?

Why do people who stutter react to stuttering in the way they do (see the work of Cooper, Manning, Murphy, Quesal, Sheehan, Williams, and others)?

Why does the occurrence of stuttering behavior seem to be so closely linked with aspects of language planning in both young children and adults (see the work of Bernstein Ratner, Conture, Hall, Howell, Logan, and others)?

More specifically, why are the loci of stuttering moments not distributed randomly with respect to linguistic, situational, and experiential variables (too many references to list)

What is the meaning, in particular, of the apparent linguistic associations in the loci of stuttering?

Why do people who stutter show differences in motoric stability (Smith) and linguistic processing, even when they are not engaged in speaking tasks (Weber-Fox) and why do these factors appear to interact?

Why do people who stutter show differences in neural functioning and possibly even structure (Blomgren, DeNil, Foundas, Fox, Ingham, Maguire, Riley, Watson, and others)?

What is the meaning of the temperamental differences between children who stutter and children who do not stutter that have recently been highlighted (Conture, Oyler, others)?

What of the fact that multiple loci seem to be implicated in genetic modeling of stuttering (Ambrose, Cox, Drayna, Felsenfeld, Yairi, and more)?

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