Savanna Green, Communication Sciences and Disorders Major

Author: Savanna Green | Major: Communication Sciences and Disorders | Semester: Spring 2024

My name is Savanna Green, and I am an Honors student in the College of Education and Health Professions. I am a Communication Sciences and Disorders major with a minor in Human Development and Family sciences with plans to become a speech-language pathologist. Over the course of the spring of 2024, I have had the pleasure of working with my mentor, Dr. Andrew Bowers, who is a part of the Communication Sciences and Disorders department.

Ever since I can remember, I have had a stutter. I viewed my stutter as the one characteristic that defined me, and I let it control my life for a very long time– I would never raise my hand in class, hated presentations, and was scared to talk on the phone or order at restaurants. For me, my stutter went beyond speech; I was filled with fear and anxiety and physically felt stuck when I tried to talk. I went through speech therapy as a child, but it did not seem to help. As I grew up, I began to gain confidence in myself and stopped letting my stutter have control over me, and now my stuttering moments happen only occasionally. I knew when I got to college that I wanted to learn more about stuttering and how it impacts not only speech, but the body as a whole through what I later learned is termed “interoceptive awareness.” When taking an Honors Research course for my major, my professor had mentioned Dr. Bowers and his previous work with stuttering, so I reached out to him and we began to work on a project he had started with a graduate student.

There are a plethora of definitions of stuttering in the clinical field of communication disorders– many of which describe stuttering as an internal sensation. However, no work has been done to explore how adults who stutter experience this sensation, how they respond to the sensation, and how it contrasts with their experience of speaking and communicating without the sensation. My honors thesis has to do with this idea of interoceptive awareness. The term “interoceptive” refers to the senses that hold information about the internal workings of the body. In turn, interoceptive awareness is an awareness of the sensations that go on beneath the surface (i.e., the sensation of a full bladder, hunger, thirst, etc.). The specific aim of my honors project is to explore, via phenomenological analysis, how adults who stutter experience a sensation of stuttering and how they experience a sensation of fluency in their speech through the lens of interoceptive awareness. Essentially, we have created a survey that includes demographic questions as well as open-ended research questions. The research questions are, how do adults who stutter describe what stuttering is, what it feels like, and what fluency feels like? The results are expected to inform hypotheses about measurable constructs that could be used in research and clinical settings to provide a means of quantifying stuttering as a sensation. These results could also be used by clinicians to better understand stuttering in order to strengthen their therapy protocols for patients. My role is to code these responses to create an essential structure for the commonalities between responses.

So far, we have gathered around 70 responses from adults who stutter across the world. Dr. Bowers has been a tremendous help in teaching me how to code the responses from the survey into different categories using a common title (i.e., multiple responses about stuttering feeling like the sensation of being “stuck” or something similar would be coded like this next to each time this response appears: [feeling stuck]). I have also learned how to research effectively for my literature review, and how to properly write a literature review with Dr. Bowers’ help. This project was started by a graduate student in the Communication Sciences and Disorders, Hazel Malcolm, who created the survey, and her role was to work on the quantitative results. Without her help in explaining what the project was about and working with me on sorting out my part in the project, I would not be able to begin working on this thesis project.

As with any research project, there are always challenges. Because I am a person who stutters and Dr. Bowers is a professor who conducts research for the field of Communication Sciences and Disorders, we had to discuss our biases toward this project. We overcame this issue by discussing that we will be looking at the responses and coding them into their common themes based off of the responses alone, and not based on what we think the participants meant due to our knowledge of the field.

My next steps include interviewing some of the participants in the survey to gather more information and hear real testimonies that will strengthen the validity of my work. I will also continue to code the responses into categories, and eventually gather those categories to create an essential structure. I will continue to conduct research on interoceptive awareness and stuttering to add to my literature review so that I can have a strong frame of reference for my thesis.