Short Biographical Sketch

Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D., C.C.C. is Professor and Chairman, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland at College Park. She holds degrees in Child Study, Speech-Language Pathology and Applied Psycholinguistics. Dr. Ratner is the editor of numerous volumes, and author of numerous chapters and articles addressing language acquisition and fluency in children. In 1996, Dr. Ratner was made a Fellow of the American Speech Language and Hearing Association. In 2006, she was presented with the Distinguished Researcher Award by the International Fluency Association.

Lecture Title

The Psycholinguistics of Stuttering

Abstract

This talk will address linguistic and psycholinguistic features of stuttering and how such features may inform understanding of the disorder and its improved treatment. First, linguistic regularities that characterize child and adult stuttering will be summarized. Next, research that has experimentally evaluated linguistic influences on stuttering will be presented. Recent work on brain imaging and event-related potentials will be offered. Examples of how such research can build and evaluate models of stuttering will be offered. In particular, I will emphasize how certain problems with existing models can be rectified if psycholinguistic features of stuttering are considered, and stuttering is conceptualized within the broader models that address speech production in general. I will close with remaining challenges for understanding the psycholinguistic features of stuttering, particularly those that result from a current lack of speech production models that address child development of sentence production skills rather than final state adult models.

Learning Outcomes

Participants will learn:

1. to summarize some linguistically regular features of stuttering in children and adults,
2. to evaluate the relevance of recent work in brain imaging and event-related potentials to models of stuttering,
3. explain how psycholinguistic research can improve our understanding of the nature of stuttering, its evaluation and its treatment.