Graduate Research Spotlight: Dysfluent Illuminations
Medical Humanities Blog Post
Graduate Research Spotlight: Dysfluent Illuminations
Stammering is a type of vocal dysfluency that involves the involuntary blocking, prolongation, and repetition of sound. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association defines stuttering as a fluency disorder; “an interruption in the flow of speech that can negatively impact an individual’s communication effectiveness, communication efficiency and willingness to speak” (“Stuttering, Cluttering, and Fluency”). Yet, an English literary analysis perspective and a critical disability studies approach questions this definition, asking what does “effective” communication look like? Is “effective” communication necessarily a direct synonym for “fluent” communication?
The emerging field of dysfluency studies fundamentally foregrounds dysfluency as an alternative form of communication that can enrich a sentence’s meaning. As a life-long-stammerer, my research follows the heartbeat of dysfluency studies. I explore how centering dysfluency might reveal ableist biases embroiled into our assumptions about how language ought to function and medical-therapeutic conceptions of stammering.
Medical Perspectives on Stammering
Approximately ten percent of children will develop a form of vocal dysfluency. Of this ten percent, eighty-five percent (a majority of whom are women) will obtain fluency with little to no therapeutic intervention, leaving approximately one percent of adults with a persistent dysfluency where men outnumber women at a ratio of approximately four to one.
With the dangling possibility for child stammerers to achieve fluency, speech-language pathology practices tend to frame obtaining fluency as the dominant goal that stammerers should work towards. Therapists refer to the period when children still possess relatively high levels of neuroplasticity as a “window of opportunity” to rescue stammerers from their unruly voices. The
medical narrative surrounding stammering approaches this zone, and dysfluency in general, with interventionist strategies that effectively, and (I would argue) reductively position fluency as the ultimate goal of speech.
Leonard Davis underscores a similar phenomenon in his influential book Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995). Noting how sign language is uniquely rooted in the present place of communication and connected with the body, Davis questions the cultural dominancy prescribed to vocal and written modes of discourse. Davis maintains that “the aural/oral method of communicating, itself seen as totally natural, like all signifying practices, is not natural but based on sets of assumptions about the body, about reality, and of course about power” later asking “what kind of assumptions are linked to this naturalized way of thinking about signifying practices?” (Davis 16, 17)
A similar game is afoot in stammering therapeutic practices. The medical narrative surrounding stammering reinforces a normative speech aesthetics that excludes the vocal diversity of dysfluent speakers. The common speech-language pathology practices of tracking the percentage of stammers in one’s speech or asking stammerers to listen to recordings of their voice and identify when they exhibited dysfluency both classify stammering as instances of impeded communication.
Fluency-shaping techniques ask speakers to distill their voice into its core components; breath and sound, and work toward building exclusively fluent speech through beginning with a soft exhalation, gently adding the voice on top of the outflowing breath, blending the vowels sounds, and lightly tapping the consonants sounds. Some speakers do find these tools to be genuinely empowering, as they can critically enable dysfluent persons to join the everyday plane of communication. But it’s worth noting how these therapeutic instructions largely ask
stammerers to exchange the vibrant, electric tonality of their staccato utterances for a uniform, monotone, and ironically repetitive voice that is laden with empirical control.
Alternative Approaches to Stammering
Artistic texts can operate as a vehicle that meaningfully challenge the dominance status that therapeutic narratives place on fluency. JJJJJerome Ellis’s poetic art installation; “Stammering Can Create Time” is an illustrative example of this phenomenon. He, and a small team of contributing stammering artists, craft textual and typographical avenues that highlight how dysfluency can add to, not inherently detract from, a statement’s meaning. While written depictions of dysfluency are not direct correlatives for hearing and producing stammered speech, this inquiry positions textual analysis as a tool for cultivating a dysfluency aesthetic that seeks to challenge medical assumptions about the value of fluency and empower stammerers by spotlighting the novel and fertile aspects of dysfluent articulation. This aesthetic also honours stammerers’ unique relationship to language and communication.
The billboard was first placed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in August 2024 and has had subsequent iterations in Canada. Each line dramatizes a different form of stammering.
Line One
The first Spanish line literally translates to the phrase “stuttering offers us time.” The space before the “tiempo” or “time” represents a block. Written in lowercase without punctuation, the text is liberated from the constraints of grammar. Eschewing dashes, commas, or semicolons, the unique spacing provides an alternative method for structuring the flow through which the sentence’s information is delivered.
The spatial separation of “time” from “us” creates a gap that becomes a well of potential meanings, as the space implicitly encourages readers to pause and consider other possibilities that stammering could offer them. This spacing visualizes how stammering imbues seemingly empty sonic and textual space with additional modes of meaning. Describing the lower plane of the text, Ellis writes that “the bottom half of the composition is empty, emphasizing a sense of pauses, silences, and expectations” (Ellis). The blocked vocal utterance crafts a unique form of silence that is charged, or haunted, by previous and forthcoming sentences. A stammered oral or textual silence cleaves a space for both the reader-writer and author-listener to reflect on the previous statement and question their predictions about the incoming threads of communication.
Line Two
From this space of increased awareness, we approach the second line. Written in Mandarin, the sentence translates to the phrase “People who stutter create time.” The repeated character “創” roughly denotes the English word “create.” Correspondingly, a more literal translation of Ellis’s text is “Stammering creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, creates, time.” On the straightforward level, this sentence is a mimetic reflection of the involuntary repetition involved in stammering. On the theoretical level, by repeating the word create, Ellis provides supporting evidence for his thesis that “Stammering Can Create Time” as readers actively experience the language enacting the work of temporal generation.
Paralleling the title of the text, the third sentence reads “stammering can create time.” As each line repeats a similar sentiment, the macro-structure of the poem reiterates a form of dysfluent repetition. To again underscore how dysfluency can enhance meaning, each echoing can be interpreted as generatively destabilizing the meaning of the previous line.
There is a difference between repetition and replication. Rather than purely duplicating a remark, each repeated sentence or sentence fragment creates a slightly new approach to a topic. The repetition, whether at the level of repeating sentiments in different languages, or at the level of repeating a single word or letter, productively questions the completeness of the initial and prior expression without totally undermining it. These repetitions continually propose (and gestures toward the existence of even more) new methods of understanding a concept. As repetitions gestures toward the limits and incompleteness of language, a dysfluent aesthetics enable Ellis to leave readers with the nagging question; can stammering create even more time?
Line Three
Finally, turning to the third line, the elongated “s” in the word “stuttering” represents a dysfluent prolongation of sound and could be pronounced “sssssstutter.” The typographical stretching of the letter “s” creates a vehicle for readers, orators, and listeners to experience an enhanced sensory engagement with the text. As readers puzzle out how long an “s” horizontally elongated to these particular dimensions should sound, their inner reading voice or their external orating voice produces the “ssss” sound. In this process, the sonic vibrancy overwhelms the letters printed in a regular typeface. The prolongation reframes the meaning of the word stutter through the lens of the sinuous, hissing, streaming, and secretive concepts that the “s” sound connotes.
There is a salient reclamation aspect to subjecting the word “stutter” to a dysfluency aesthetics. The word “stutter” holds an infamously tricky series of syllables and many stammerers experience difficulty pronouncing the name of their condition. The bitter irony of this naming is emblematic of the therapeutic attitude toward dysfluency that overarchingly excludes the value of vocal diversity. Autoethnographic renderings of dysfluency emerge as
powerful tools that can challenge the presumed value of fluency. Operating at the edges of language, a dysfluency aesthetics can ultimately empower dysfluent speakers to perceive the generative and illuminative potential of their pleated, snagged, and re-stitched utterances.
Works Cited
Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. Verso Books, 1995.
JJJJJerome Ellis et al. Stuttering Can Create Time. 2024. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
“Stuttering, Cluttering, and Fluency.” American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/fluency-disorders/?srsltid=....
Tess Casher holds two master’s degrees in English literature from the University of Oxford. After publishing a middle-grade novel (Sleuths in Skates) that seeks to provide dysfluency representation and promote compassionate communication, she’s excited to continue to explore the relationship between English literature and dysfluency. This research blog draws on her master’s research conducted at the University of Oxford. She is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Alberta.
