Yamada Jun, Homma Takanobu
Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University, Hiroshima 739-8521, Japan.
Med Hypotheses. 2007;69(6):1196-9. doi: 10.1016/j.mehy.2007.02.045. Epub 2007 May 18.
On the assumption that stuttering is essentially acquired behavior, it has been concluded that speech-related anticipatory anxiety as a major cause of stuttering accounts for virtually all apparently-different aspects of stuttering on the behavioral level. Stutterers' linguistic competence is unimpaired, although their speech production is characterized as "disfluent". Yet, such disfluency is dramatically reduced when such people speak in anxiety-free no-audience conditions. Furthermore, our pilot study of oral reading in Japanese indicates that a stutterer can easily replace stuttering events with a common interjection, "eh", and make oral reading sound natural and fluent. Given these facts, we propose the Overlearning Fluency when Alone (OFA) treatment, consisting of two distinct but overlapping steps: (1) Overlearning of fluency in a no-audience condition, and (2) Use of an interjection, "eh", as a starter when a stuttering event is anticipated. It remains to be demonstrated that this is a truly simple and effective treatment for "one of mankind's most baffling afflictions".
基于口吃本质上是后天习得行为这一假设，得出的结论是，与言语相关的预期焦虑作为口吃的主要原因，在行为层面上几乎解释了口吃所有明显不同的方面。口吃者的语言能力并未受损，尽管他们的言语表达具有“不流畅”的特征。然而，当这些人在无焦虑、无听众的条件下说话时，这种不流畅会显著减少。此外，我们对日语朗读的初步研究表明，口吃者可以轻松地用一个常见的感叹词“嗯”来替代口吃现象，使朗读听起来自然流畅。鉴于这些事实，我们提出了独自过度学习流畅性（OFA）疗法，它由两个不同但相互重叠的步骤组成：（1）在无听众的条件下过度学习流畅性，（2）在预期会出现口吃现象时，使用感叹词“嗯”作为起始词。对于“人类最令人困惑的痛苦之一”，这是否是一种真正简单有效的治疗方法，仍有待证明。
