Ana Flavia Lopes Magela Gerhardt

I'd like to present a discussion about my life as a PWS and at the same time a person who investigates the always rich relationship between language and cognition - a special way in which I can see a kind of an intersection between these two worlds, where it's possible to think about stutter through a social-cognitive perspective, according to which the majority of the cognitive and mental processes, including language, take place and are structured through interaction, and the self-recognition of a person demands a gestalt and organic perception of the space around e what is included in it.

Specifically, I talk about the idea of conceptual integration (also known as conceptual blending), developed in the work of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, who propose a relationship between elements of (perhaps different) two domains from a generic space with aspects common to them, in order to form a fourth space, called blend space. It is important to say that conceptual integration is present in every meaning construction, also in the meanings that emerge in interaction – included here are the images of the speaker and the hearer.

For the studying of stutter as a social-cognitive phenomenon, together with its consideration as a genetic, neurophysiologic, psychoanalytic etc. condition, the use of a representational-descriptive model such as conceptual integration allows us to observe and analyze stutter in terms of cognitive science, as well to understand how exactly we can talk about the projection (or mapping) of personal images that the common sense considers when we interact, and, specially, when we stutter.

The conceptual integration model is a powerful way to demonstrate the event of stutter in real time, say, show the event as it unfolds, with its participants and its manifestations in the moment they occur, and this way revealing stutter as a meaningful phenomenon, because it is part of the integration of concepts that subsumes interactional negotiation, it can be found among its components, and it takes part of the result of the process. As a meaningful condition, stutter signals particularly to each PWS, and it is his/her concern (better with professional support) to learn about his/her own signs, to be literate in his/her own language.

For me, especially, this speech is both a way of dealing with my stutter I'd like to pass on to others and a report on the research I do about stutter and cognition; in this sense, this discussion becomes important because it has allowed me self-awareness about how I can delineate my ways of relationship, and what things are involved in my particular stutter events.