|About the presenter: Rick Arenas is a doctoral student at the University of Iowa. He received his Master's degree in Speech Pathology from Iowa in 2005, since that time he has been working in the Stuttering Research Lab at Iowa. His main research interests are in stuttering and how temperament and emotions interact with speech production. His goal is to help establish research paradigms and techniques that help explain the role that emotions play in the development and maintenance of stuttering behaviors.|
In experimental settings altered auditory feedback (AAF) has been shown to decrease the number of disfluencies in people who stutter (PWS). AAF refers to one or both of the following types of auditory feedback: delayed auditory feedback (DAF) in which the persons vocal output is fed back into their ear at a slight delay similar to hearing an echo, and frequency altered feedback (FAF) where the persons vocal output is fed back into their ear with a change in pitch, either higher (sounding like a chipmunk) or lower (sounding like Darth Vader). The knowledge that AAF can have a positive effect on the speech of PWS has been around for many years but until fairly recently the technology to provide the AAF has been limited to speech clinics and research institutions. However, within the last few years AAF devices have reached the "mainstream" and have allowed PWS to use AAF on their own.
There are two potential problems that I can see with the current stage in the technological advancement of AAF devices. The first is that the technology is just far enough along that these devices are small and portable but the technology is not quite far enough advanced to make the devices reasonably priced. Although most of the companies provide a money back guarantee during a specified trial period, there is still a risk of not getting your money's worth out of the device when you consider the fact that these devices are thousands of dollars. The second problem, that I believe is the most important, is the lack of information that is currently out there about AAF in the "real world". Below is a list of things that I believe are potential gaps in the information about AAF:
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