Author Description

This book is written in response to several demands. Of course, the information presented in it is available in several other books and journal articles on fluency and stuttering. Nevertheless, the book puts together information that most books and journal articles have not considered in the literature commonly available in India, with the exception of articles in international journals. This information will be helpful to graduate students, researchers, and faculty, I hope. Several books have provided extensive literature on particular topics, but a comprehensive compilation is not available. Therefore, this book is written. Stuttering is a heterogenous disorder of speech, and unlike other speech disorders, it has much variability in terms of time, situation, a person with whom the Persons With Stuttering (PWS) are communicating etc. Also, it appears that there may be sub-groups among PWS. Several hypotheses have been postulated to understand normal speech production, but this area is still naïve as none of the theories address all of the questions related to stuttering and its treatment. To understand and diagnose stuttering, it is extremely important to know about fluency. Thus, this book covers definitions of fluency, disfluency and dysfluency in chapter 1, fluency development in normal children in chapter 2, the anatomical and physiological bases of fluency in chapter 3, the acoustic basis of fluency in chapter 4, genetic basis in chapter 5, and linguistic basis in chapter 6. Of course there are additional bases of fluency, such as psychological or prosodic, which are not covered in the book. The reason is that Children With Stuttering (CWS), especially in the initial stages, may not have any psychological basis, and prosody- intonation, stress, and rhythm - is difficult to measure. Yet, some parts of prosody like stress and rhythm are covered as fluency enhancers in chapters 1 and 2. Relevant journal articles are reviewed and presented where necessary. I thoug