Savanna Green, Communication Sciences and Disorders Major

Author: Savanna Green | Major: Communication Sciences and Disorders | Semester: Fall 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 and fall 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.

I have known throughout my first years of college that I wanted to conduct research pertaining to stuttering. Since my childhood, I have struggled with feeling like an outsider because of my stutter. When I stuttered, I felt embarrassed and would always wonder what my conversational partner would think of me– would they see me as “weird,” “strange,” or “incompetent?” Being constantly surrounded by these heavy emotions and thoughts tankered my self-esteem throughout my puberty days. However, my self-confidence began to climb as I learned to not let my stutter consume my every thought. The anticipating feelings soon subsided, and although I still stutter today, I do not let it control my life.

My honors research pertains to this idea of interoceptive awareness, or the senses we feel due to internal workings of the body (feelings of hunger, thirst, increased heart rate due to being nervous, etc.). This idea of interoceptive awareness can be used to describe how people who stutter experience their moments of stuttering. The implications of using interoceptive awareness to redefine stuttering can prove to be beneficial in the clinical understanding of stuttering, which can help the development of treatment plans for therapy. Current definitions of stuttering apply mostly to the overt and covert symptoms (the stuttering moments that the speaker can hear; the secondary emotions that come with stuttering). While these definitions are helpful, understanding that stuttering goes past those secondary emotions of shame and embarrassment and can be described by interoceptive awareness opens up a new approach for speech therapy.

I found my mentor through taking an Honors Introduction to Research class my spring semester of sophomore year. This class pertained specifically to my major, and my professor gave us recommendations on who to reach out to based on our interests. She had mentioned Dr. Andrew Bowers, whose focus was on researching stuttering. I knew right away that this is who I wanted to do my research with, so I set up a meeting with him to see what kind of projects he was working on.

So, Dr. Bowers and I created a survey asking adults who stutter (AWS) to define what stuttering is and what stuttering feels like, as well as what fluency feels like. Last semester, my focus was on gathering results and working on writing my literature review. We were able to successfully gather over 70 responses worldwide from AWS, and we began analyzing 34 responses. We sorted responses by general themes that emerged from the results, such as the feeling of being “stuck” or by secondary emotions such as shame or embarrassment.

This semester, I have been working on generating an essential structure that encompasses the major themes that have emerged from our phenomenological analysis. We have found four main categories of discussion: awareness of disrupted control of speech-language execution, responses to an awareness of disruption, awareness of disrupted communication, and the internal awareness of fluency. From this, we have been able to generate an essential structure that we are continuing to modify to eliminate bias. I am now working on writing the discussion section of my thesis.

Because Dr. Bowers and I both stutter, we have had to overcome the challenge of continuously working to avoid bias in our analysis and the formation of our essential structure. This has been eye-opening to work through, and I have learned how important it is to discuss our biases and how influential they can be in research.

Throughout my time researching stuttering and learning how other adults experience their stuttering, it has been extremely validating. I have learned that I am not alone in my feelings regarding my stutter, and it is relieving to know that other people feel similarly to me. It has also been interesting to research the history of different stuttering treatments because I have tried to implement some into my own day-to-day life to see if they would work for me.

Dr. Bowers has been a tremendous help in the formulation of my honors thesis. He has helped me narrow down topics for my literature review as well as my discussion section. He has also assisted in the development of the central themes as well as navigating how to approach drafting an essential structure.

Next up for me is wrapping up my honors thesis. Once I finish writing the discussion and conclusion, Dr. Bowers and I will ensure that my paper is well-crafted and that all aspects of my research are documented. I will then create my honors poster as well as my honors powerpoint to defend my thesis in May.