This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Traditional speech-language therapy for people who stutter has largely operated under a medical model focused on eliminating dysfluency—breaks in the normal rhythm of speech. But for Rodney Gabel, a professor of speech-language pathology at Binghamton University, and Ladan Khoshbin, a doctoral student in Binghamton's Community Research and Action program, true progress in stuttering research begins with listening to people's stories.
Khoshbin, an international student and licensed speech-language pathologist (SLP) from Iran, moved to Binghamton in 2023 to work with Gabel, a prominent figure in the stuttering field and a person who stutters. Their collaboration recently culminated in a study published in the Journal of Fluency Disorders that examined archival personal narratives of recovery to highlight what individuals who stutter need from clinical care. The study challenges standard fluency-centered models by placing personal stories at the core of therapy.
Gabel and Khoshbin's study used a data set from the Voices Past and Present collection of recovery-focused personal narratives by SLPs who stutter, presented at American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) convention panels and professional forums dating back to 1957. Gabel, one of the ASHA panelists featured in 2003, had been using the data set as an educational tool for years. "I'd have students go through the narratives and pick out what they thought was most important," he said.
"It's a good way for students to learn and become familiar with what it's like to be a person who stutters." When Khoshbin was assigned this qualitative content analysis in her first year as a doctoral student under Gabel, she thought it was "exactly what I had been looking for, for many years." She and Gabel became interested in what they could learn about change, growth and the experience of stuttering by using this source material. For their study, they used narrative inquiry and thematic analysis, an approach Gabel described as "the perfect combination of an art and a science," to evaluate 30 narratives presented at ASHA panels from 1996 to 2019, each reflecting on the person's lived experience with stuttering and ongoing journey toward living effectively with it. "I started with thematic analysis ... but this was not telling the story, and I'm interested in the story part," said Khoshbin, who led the data review.
"I wanted to see the bigger picture: how people started, how they got to their turning point, how they felt during ups and downs, and how they try to continue and advocate for acceptance." Through this process, Gabel and Khoshbin uncovered six core themes that are central to growth and recovery: A central contribution of the study is its assessment of traditional definitions of recovery. While medical models frame recovery as symptom elimination, stuttering is typically a lifelong condition. Instead, Gabel and Khoshbin advocate for a paradigm shift toward living effectively.
"Recovery means you've recovered from an illness—and that doesn't happen, because stuttering doesn't just stop," Gabel said. "Is there actually anything wrong with stuttering? It's just a different way of talking.
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