" *I get the impression that you do not want to accept stuttering as a real, biological speech disorder, but rather wish to focus on how to eliminate it.* " This is a great response. Could you please go deeper into where you got this from? After reading many research studies, in my understanding stuttering can be categorized in many ways. One way is by categorizing stuttering between "Incipient stuttering" and "Developed stuttering" (which you can google. A many variety of researchers have investigated this). I think that we should accept incipient stuttering (mild error-prone speech), and work to improve the developed (the more persistent) stuttering, do you agree with this assumption? Basically the way I see it is, incipient stuttering refers to speech formulation difficulties (from genetic and neurological predispositions that impair speech and language). Incipient stuttering may coincide with critical moments in language development when the child is in the process of acquiring a new syntactic structure or rule. Early experiences of struggle to speak or communicate may stem from delayed speech, impaired articulation, aphasia, brain injury, cerebral palsy and mental deficiency, and ‘‘virtually anything at all that is calculated to shake children’s faith in their ability to speak. Elevated dopamine levels and cerebellar impairment may both also play roles in impairing speech perception. They may cause speakers to become hypersensitive to cues that alert them to potential upcoming difficulty. Elevated dopamine levels may cause misinterpretation of auditory feedback, thus distorting speakers’ perceptions of their performances, thus causing them to rely excessively on auditory feedback instead. Incipient stuttering may lead to poor quality of speech or poor control over focus of attention. Genetics and neurology may predispose to stuttering but their contribution is likely much less important than that of our understandings and beliefs. A subset of stutterers are relatively slow at speech planning in general and make somewhat more speech planning errors than non-stutterers. Their speech motor control abilities are somewhat below average, but not sufficiently so for them (or their listener) to be consciously aware that they are impaired. This subset of stutterers may be predisposed to genes that cause, for example, hypersensitivity to sensory feedback, abnormally slow or impaired speech planning or speech motor control abilities, or abnormalities in dopamine metabolism. Conclusion: So, the distal causes of stuttering is multifactorial: any factors (inherited, acquired or environmental) that cause speakers to anticipate difficulty speaking or communicating may predispose to stuttering. Developed stuttering (which is persistent stuttering - the severe form of stuttering), in my understanding, developed stuttering almost invariably appears to be of the execution difficulty type - this does not in any way imply that people do not ever recover from it. It is likely that recovery from execution difficulty stuttering is the rule, rather than the exception, and that most recovery occurs in early childhood. If this true, it would imply that although the presence of advancing symptoms in young children who stutter is a reliable indicator of the presence of execution-difficulty stuttering, it is probably not a strong or reliable predictor of persistence. According to Yairi, Ambrose and Ratner: "*Stuttering only begins a year or more after a child first starts uttering his first words."* And thus, after the child has started to become aware of the need to regulate execution