ABSTRACT
Despite the growing pool of knowledge about stuttering, many stutterers in therapy continue to find difficulties in achieving reliable fluency. The intractability of many - if not most - fluency problems leads many therapists to conclude that solving the stuttering problem involves more than reducing the number of stutters to zero. Without the yardstick of fluency, however, it has proved difficult to decide what constitutes successful therapeutic outcome. Opinions differ not only about the definition of successful therapy but about the nature of stuttering and therefore the most appropriate type of intervention. This does not mean to say we have no understanding of the problem for there is much well-documented information about stuttering (e.g. see reviews by Bloodstein, 1981; Van Riper, 1982; Andrews, Craig, Feyer, Hoddinott, Howie and Neilson, 1983). However, this chapter questions whether we have paid sufficient attention to the relationship between speech behaviour and language skills in general, and to the linguistic functions of nonfluency in particular. The functional significance of non-fluency in stuttered and non-stuttered speech may have implications both for the theory and therapy of stuttering.
