It’s technically a primary stuttering behavior by the book, but it’s only laid out that way so we can diagnose stuttering as a communication disorder and differentiate it from the more common childhood stuttering. technically it’s more of a phenomenon where a person anticipates a moment of stuttering and the fight-flight-freeze (in this case, freeze) response from the amygdala activates due to fear of stuttering. There are plenty of studies that suggest higher activity in the amygdala in stuttering people, which you can research if you want. Now, is that heightened activity in the amygdala due to the differences in neural function or structure that stuttering people already have? Or is it because of a learned fear of stuttering? That’s something we still can’t say for sure yet because stuttering research is still ongoing. Sometimes though, it’s okay to rely on clinical experience. In my experience (and in many others), you can actually teach a person to recognize when a block might happen and then take control of it and stutter easier with no tension (no tension = no blocks). Of course, there’s always just the fact that when kids first start stuttering, there are no blocks, just part word repetitions. When do blocks start to happen? Right around the same time we start becoming very aware of our communicative differences.