Question to everyone: What have you learned from stuttering researchers? What I learned from the researcher Sheehan: * PWS make communication problems too important * PWS make the meanings of words too important, and we are never really satisfied with the result - Stuttering is a disorder of the social presentation of the self * Stuttering is not a speech disorder but a conflict revolving around self and role, an identity problem * Stuttering is role-specific behavior: specific to the speaker role and to the listener relationship. It takes two to stutter. * When the stutterer attempts to deny his stuttering behavior and to represent himself as a fluent speaker (which he is part of the time), he then creates tensions -relating to fear of failure of the role expectation. * The stutterer stops whenever conflicting approach and avoidance tendencies reach an equilibrium. * The occurrence of stuttering reduces the fear that elicited it, so that during the block there is sufficient reduction in fear-motivated avoidance to resolve the conflict, permitting the release of the blocked word. * The conflict in stuttering is not simply between speaking versus inhibiting expected stuttering. In the double approach-avoidance conflict situation, there is both a conflict between speaking and not speaking and between being silent or not being silent. The avoidance does not come primarily from the fear of stuttering as such but from the competition between the alternative possibilities of speech and silence, with the stuttering a resultant of this conflict. * Speaking holds the promise of communication but the threat of stuttering; silence eliminates temporarily the threat involved in speaking, but at a cost of abandonment of communication and consequent frustration. Many stutterers show a fear of silence, and filibuster furiously in their speech to keep any pause from becoming dangerously long. Since most stuttering occurs initially, silence plus initiation of speech becomes a conditioned cue for the painful experiences of anxiety and stuttering. * Through the interplay of perceptions, the listener concludes that stuttering must be something shameful and joins the stutterer in pretending that nothing is out of the ordinary. By engaging in a false role, the stutterer draws his listener into an equally false role. In the manifest experience of his conflict between going ahead and holding back, the stutterer inadvertently places the listener in a conflict as well. * We must not overlook the primary loss to communicate