Theories

Cerebral Dominance Theory

• Ortin & Travis 1920s & 30s

• Stuttering occurs because of a different pattern of hemispheric dominance of PWS compared to PWNS

• TX: involved restraining right hand so that PWS would “switch back” to left handedness and cerebral dominance would be restored. TX not effective, in general

Demands and Capacities Model

• A child has a specific set of demands, internal and external

• When demands exceed the capacities of the individual, fluency breaks down.

• Internal: things the child expects about themselves, External: a child who is in a big family and all of them needs moms attention, they are in competition for that attention

• Strengths

  • intuitive appealing

  • Easy to explain to parents and others

  • Accounts for lots of factors that can impact a person's stuttering

• Weaknesses: 

  • The model is circular, when a child stutters, is the demand the problem or capacities?

  • We don't have a specific list of all demands and capacities that could potentially impact stuttering

Multifactoral dynamic model

• The occurrence of speech behavior of stuttering is only a surface event

• There are many systems, neurophysiological, psychological, motoric, linguistic. Operate beneath the visible stuttering behavior

• Systems interacts with each other

Covert repair hypothesis

• A psycholinguistic theory- PWS have difficulty encoding phonological info

• Relies on basic speech production model: conceptualization, phonetic planning, execution

• planning/internal monitoring phases that cause problems for PWS

EXPLAN Theory

• Two processes during speech production execution (EX) & Planning (PLAN)

• Processes happen concurrently

• difficulties coordinating these processes can contribute to disfluencies.

Cybernetic Theory

• In speech production, feedback regulates output 

• Incorrect or distorted feedback may lead a speaker to detect and attempt to correct an error that did not actually occur.

Communicative Pressure Theory

• Stuttering develops out of the child's fears of communicative failure

Diagnostic Theory

• Stuttering occurs when parents/others inappropriately label their child who is normally disfluent as a stutter

Approach-Avoidance Conflict Theory

• A psychological (nur-ture) theory that proposes that stuttering resulted from opposing drive or tendencies to both speak and refrain from speaking.

• The person wants to communicate but may simultaneously fear or avoid the speaking situation.

Dual-Diathesis Stressor Model

• A multifactorial model that suggests that stuttering develops from an interaction between speech-language and/or emotional diatheses and stressors associated with environmental factors.