Una revisione critica degli studi 'linguistici' sulla balbuzie

Studies on the stutterers' disfluencies have always been a popular field of research, mostly because of the diagnostic and therapeutic importance of stutterers' behavior. Those studies are based on the concept, that the listener by using his perception and cognition is able to distinguish the stutterer's verbal disfluencies from the disfluencies of the "normal" speaker. There are two types of studies on disfluencies which are considered to be traditional. The first type, consists on the individuation and quantification of the cognitive and situational variables that influence listener's evaluation. The second one, concerns the localization of the "loci " of the utterance that are associated with the stuttering occurences and the explanation of these occurences. The results of these studies, despite their theoretical and methodological defeciences, have long fascinated the researchers that hoped that those results would provide a linguistic explanation of stuttering. However, recent critics seem to diminish the role of these studies. Even those researchers who remain faithful to the hypothesis of the linguistic planning disorder, had to appeal to more formal and sophisticated theories, models and methods.