Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Preparing my presentation for Antwerp

The Antwerp conference is this Friday and Saturday, and I am giving a one-hour workshop on Explaining natural recovery.

Over the last 2-3 years, I have developed a framework within which to understand stuttering. But as always, laziness and being distracted has prevented me from actually writing it up. So the conference is a good opportunity. I will start out with a general framework, and use this framework to give a possible explanation of natural recovery.

What are the key concepts?

1) The core underlying reason for stuttering is a neurobiological deficit leading to a functional deficit.

2) This functional deficit is an abnormally frequent and abnormally long delay in speech initiation despite the fact that the message to be spoken is ready and the person want to say the message.

3) This deficit can have many different causes like genes, incidents during development, or a combination. So there are subtypes in the cause.



4) This deficit reveals itself at a stage in the child development, because the abnormally frequent and abnormally long delays in speech initiation leads to overt symptoms that restrict functionality like communicating in a dialogue or that compares as abnormal to other children's speech behaviours.

5) The overt symptoms lead to a reaction of the child and its environment, and to an adaptation.

6) In order to understand this adaptation, we need a framework that encapsulates the different aspects of humans, like a biopsychosocial model. The deficit is in the bio, the adaptation (behaviourally and cognitive) in the psycho, and the social interaction.

7) I have developed such a BPS model.

I am running out of time as I have to finish my presentation... ;-)

5 comments:

Richard Bourgondien said...

Looking forward to hear what you have to say Tom.
See you in Antwerp!

Richard Bourgondien (ELSA)

Anonymous said...

are you going to report and blog on the conference (for those people interested who could not make it).

Just report anything new...please.

Take good notes!

Ora said...

Tom - What's novel about your framework? I think that these ideas are generally accepted, aren't they?

To avoid misunderstanding... I mean no disrespect. I'm just interested to know what you're bringing to the discussion that's new or different.

Anonymous said...

Yup, nothing ground-breaking there.

Tom Weidig said...

I will publish my talk here. Not saying it is new, but makes things conceptually clearer. Especially the biopsychosocial impact.