The articulatory movement of pharyngeal stops of a twenty-two years old male with mental retardation and unoperated cleft palate was investigated. Pharyngeal stops was evaluated by the following methods: auditory assesment of vowels and syllables, oral examination in articulation, naso-pharyngeal fiberscopy and videoradiographic examination. The results were as follows: 1) The patient showed remarkable hypernasality on the production of vowels. In articulation, the consonants, /p, t, k, b, d, g, t∫, ts, dz, d3/ showed pharyngeal stops, /s, ∫/ pharyngeal fricatives and /r, m, n, j/ were distorted. The consonants, /s, ∫/ were pharyngeal stops occasionally. 2) On oral examination, the elevation of dorsum of the tongue was not observed in articulation [ka], while the root of the tongue moved horizontally to the posterior pharyngeal wall. 3) The closure between the root of the tongue and the posterior pharyngeal wall was observed on examination with nasopharyngeal fiberscopy and videoradiography. 4) In this case, the pharyngeal stops in many consonants may be due to velopharyngeal imcompetence, micrognathia and mental retardation.

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To examine the world trends in stuttering research, the research presented at the ASHA Annual Conventions for the past five years from 1988 through 1992 were summarized. The number of the proposal in each year was 58, 54, 62, 62, 58, that is approximately 4-5% of the whole. The main research categories were: (1) the stutterer per se (physiological, linguistic, and developmental aspects, and follow-up studies), (2) listener's attitudes and mothers' nonverbal behaviors, (3) intervention techniques (for adults, school children and preschoolers), and (4) others which includes the activities of self-help groups, and related disorders such as cluttering. In general, physiological research, especially on speech motor control, is greatly increasing, and the age for starting therapy is getting younger. Although there is no consensus on etiology and therapeutic methods, when working with stutterers, it is necessary for the clinitian to clarify his/her own view of stuttering and rationale for therapy.

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This report briefly discusses the following aspects of physiological research on stuttering: 1) physiological measurement of voicing and articulatory movement in stutterers and nonstutterers, 2) auditory processes in stutterers and nonstutterers, 3) speech motor processes in stutterers and nonstutterers, 4) a genetic approach to stuttering.
It was revealed that some young stutterers tended to have difficulty stabilizing and controlling laryngeal movement even during the perceptually fluent speech. Stutterers may have difficulty in motor programming speech behavior. The young stutterers showed a greater percentage of no ear and left ear preference than the controls, but the older stuttering subjects did not differ significantly from the control groups. The research on brain stem electrical responses of stutterers and nonstutterers revealed that females had significantly faster rates of neural transmission than males. DAF research showed speech motor processes dynamically. Susceptibility to DAF in stutterers was significantly higher than that in controls suggesting that stutterers relied on auditory feedback for speech more than nonstutterers. Greater refinement in nosology for understanding of the genetic aspect of stuttering is needed.

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Speech fluency is acquired during the course of the child's overall speech-language development and its autonomy is firmly established in early childhood. The child's ability to speak fluently therefore, presupposes “learning” and stands on linguistic and physiological bases. To understand stuttering, we need to understand the whole picture of the stuttering problem from a developmental viewpoint.
There has been a widely and mistakenly accepted stereotype among speech-language clinicians that stuttering is “uncurable”. This idea probably comes from naive observations of many adult stutterers' speech. However, we should not forget that very few of them received necessary help to support their speech fluency development in their early years of stuttering. It is possible to remedy incipient stuttering indirectly and very naturally not by so-called “methods of correcting stuttering” but by the clinical application of play therapy techniques to facilitate the fluent speech that the child concurrently posseses.
This paper presents the issues of the earliest possible treatments of childhood stuttering and discusses the development of speech motor control in both stuttering and normally speaking children from the results of this author's recent research and others' studies.

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