From: Jonathan Bashor
Date: 10/5/01
Time: 8:44:52 AM
Remote Name: 209.180.242.122
This is complicated, but I'll keep it brief. From my reading of Jerome Kagan, I've learned that some children become overly sensitive to stimuli in their environment. For me, I believe I started reacting to a particular situation going on in my household at about age 4 which conflicted my willingness to express myself verbally. This is what William Perkins calls the self-expressive conflict. I started restraining my voice and using my speech mechanisms incorrectly. There is a neuro-psychological component of this also. The emotional memory of those early events was stored and are triggered by situations which resemble the early ones resulting again in using the speech mechanism incorrectly. Slowly, that pattern of speech became the dominant one in many situations but not all. And, unpleasant listener reactions to my dysfluency only added new triggers to induce that self-expressive conflict.