People who stammer less perfectionistic?

Paul Brocklehurst discussed his research and experiences in a BSA Scotland conference call in September 2010. Here he outlines some of his research, and wonders whether people who stammer may be able to communicate more effectively in certain situations by paying less attention to accuracy.

In 1977 I travelled to Edinburgh to try out the Edinburgh Masker, a portable device designed to induce fluency by preventing the wearer from hearing the sound of his own voice when speaking. I was 18 at the time. Although I never adopted the masker as a fluency aid, the visit introduced me to the possibility that my stammering was in some way related to a tendency to listen too much to the sound of my own voice; and ever since then, I've harboured a desire to understand why this might be so.

"It introduced me to the possibility that my stammering was in some way related to a tendency to listen too much to the sound of my own voice."

Some twenty five years later, I was reminded of that Edinburgh visit by an article that appeared in the Autumn 2002 edition of Speaking Out: Are adults who stammer too sensitive?. In it, the authors, Robin Lickley, Melanie Russell and Martin Corley, outlined research they had been carrying out, also in Edinburgh, looking at whether people who stammer pay too much attention to their speech and are too strict about what they consider acceptable. This article was of particular interest to me, not least because I had been asking myself the same questions, on and off, ever since my visit to Edinburgh as a teenager. It was heartening to discover that this question was being addressed by a team of researchers nearby. I started to wonder whether there may be a way in which I too could become involved.

One thing led to another, and finally, in 2007 I applied and was accepted onto the psycholinguistics MSc course at the University of Edinburgh. Then, in 2008 I managed to secure funding to complete a PhD there, specifically with the remit of investigating the role of monitoring in stammering, with Martin and Robin (authors of the article) as my supervisors. I've just started the final year.

Attention to accuracy

One of the main focuses of my work here has been on the relationship between speech-errors and disfluencies, both in people who stammer, and also in normally-fluent speakers. This has been a hot topic in psycholinguistics ever since the 1980's, when a number of researchers proposed that disfluencies occur as a side-effect of trying to avoid making errors. The original suggestion was that the more speakers try to avoid making mistakes, the more likely they are to be disfluent. So when faced with utterances that are difficult to produce (like tonguetwisters, for example), speakers are faced with a dilemma: if they try to speak at a normal speech-rate, they can either be fluent, or accurate, but not both.

In everyday life, most of the things people try to say are quite easy to understand even if they do come out slightly wrongly. So it is likely that most speakers generally pay more attention to fluency than accuracy. In my research, I decided to explore whether, unlike normally-fluent speakers, people who stammer have, for one reason or another, developed the habit of paying more attention to accuracy; and, if so, whether they pay more attention to it than they really need to.

Although the program of research is not yet complete, the results from our early studies already throw some light on the above question. In one such study, we explored the possibility that people who stammer have perfectionistic personalities and, as a result, pay too much attention to the accuracy of their speech. Contrary to expectations, the responses indicated that the participants who stammer were significantly more concerned about making mistakes, but set their standards slightly lower compared to the normally fluent participants, in other words that they are actually marginally less perfectionistic than normally fluent speakers. The lower personal-standards ratings surprised me, as previous research has tended to equate stammering with perfectionism.

Tonguetwisters

We then carried out a series of experiments to explore whether, compared to normally-fluent speakers, people who stammer make more mistakes when speaking. To enable us to make a valid comparison, we asked participants to recite tonguetwisters in time to a metronome beat. We found that, compared to the normally fluent participants, the stammering participants indeed consistently made (and self-reported) significantly more speech errors. In particular they were more likely to mix up sounds in words and also more likely to say the words themselves in the wrong order.

"Perhaps, for people who stammer, trying to achieve a similar level of speech accuracy to normally-fluent speakers may sometimes be counter-productive."

Interestingly, the conversational speech of people who stammer is not generally perceived as containing more errors. But maybe they only achieve a similar level of accuracy to normally fluent speakers because they are more concerned about making mistakes. If this is the case, this focus on accuracy may indeed come at the expense of fluency; and perhaps, for people who stammer, trying to achieve a similar level of speech accuracy to normally-fluent speakers may sometimes be counter-productive.

For myself, a key question that I hope can ultimately be addressed is whether people who stammer may be able to communicate more effectively in certain situations by paying less attention to accuracy. If this turns out to be the case, then perhaps as time goes on, therapists will be able to devise ways of helping individuals who stammer arrive at an optimal awareness of when, and to what extent, a relaxation of their focus on accuracy would be beneficial.

Extended version of article in the Winter 2010 issue of Speaking Out, page 16