November 29th, 2021

Post date: December 22, 2021

Our E. MAINE NSA chapter met on Zoom this past Monday and 7 of us attended. It was great to see Megan, Chris, Andy, Martha and myself zooming in from Maine and Rick from Mass and Jeff from California. We spent all our time just moving around the circle sharing news and discussing points of interest as they came up. A brief summary: Andy has started work as a consultant (bioengineering) and is looking forward to this challenge. Biggest new challenge though is joining up with Toastmasters and will be presenting his first introduction speech soon. Rick attended a one day virtual conference of the Canadian Stuttering Association (CSA) and thought it was time well spent. Next year it will be in Niagara Falls. He also shared with us the research project he participated in (see his earlier link to the research site). He shared that it was easy and all through an app and he felt good about contributing to furthering knowledge about the aspects and variability of stuttering. The investigators are still needing subjects so he encouraged us all to go to the website to see if it's something we'd like to do. Jeff reported that life is good in California! Working at home and living alone, he needing to go out to initiate contacts.  Megan is working with her SLP to begin to disclose and be willing to talk to others about her stutter and it's helping to decrease her nervousness. High fives for Megan and this led to a general discussion of benefits gained from disclosing and sharing vulnerability with others. Chris will be heading to Canada soon to visit his son and family, and we still discussed the issue of phone calls for a person who stutters. We miss the verbal cues and feedback and the fact that the person on the other end has a hard time interpreting "silent pauses", especially if they don't know we stutter. Learning a new language is also a challenge and both Chris and Marybeth are engaging in this challenge. Martha and Marybeth, the SLPs of the group, shared some take-aways from the "virtual" conference of the American Speech and Language Association which was held the week before Thanksgiving. They both appreciated the new directions of research that are happening. Does the fact that stuttering is a neurophysiological disorder (i.e. not mental/psychological) change the public perception? And similar to the research that Rick participated in, researchers are looking to new qualitative research methods that truly document a stutterer's "lived experience of stuttering" (e.g. variability, anticipation) and how that can be a more valid definition of stuttering than counting numbers of words/syllables stuttered. All these new research results will benefit SLPs working with kids/adults who stutter in terms of changing the negative impact on their lives. 

Okay! That's it! Long report I guess but there was lots to talk about.

Enjoy the snow!