ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the following four chapters, we review some recent theories of stuttering. For the moment we use the term “theories” in the broadest sense, to mean theories, models, and hypotheses. Theories have been included according to four criteria. First, the theory has appeared in the professional and/or scientific literature in the last 15 years. The first publication of the theory may have been prior to this, but to be included the theory must have been alluded to or cited in the past 15 years. Second, the theory is causal in that it provides an explanation for the cause of stuttering. Third, it is referred to by the author or authors as a theory, a model, or a hypothesis. There are other theoretical musings about the cause of stuttering in the literature that we excluded because the author or authors have not labelled them, or developed them formally, as a theory. Wingate, for example, has written extensively on his view that stuttering is an intra-syllabic transition defect. However, as this view has not been presented as a formal theory, it was not included. The fourth criterion was that the theory has attracted interest in the stuttering literature. There was one other constraint in the selection of theories, which was that we drew only from the English-language literature. We acknowledge that influential theories from other cultures will have been omitted because of this.
