‘Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis’, which posits that the anticipation of upcoming speech or communication failure causes people who stutter (PWS) to make adjustments to their way of speaking that result in the production of stuttered disfluencies. Importantly, however, stuttering only starts to become persistent when these repeated experiences of speech or communication difficulty are sufficiently disruptive to cause the speaker to respond with tension and fragmentation to the mere anticipation that they may occur. By postulating that, in people who stutter, the anticipation of speech or communication failure precipitates a response that itself results in the failure that was anticipated, the hypothesis also provides an explanation for how stuttering may persist even in situations where any underlying language or speech impairment has resolved and where the listener and the speaking environment no longer pose any obstacles to communication. The adaptation effect has been well established and has been attributed to a number of possible causes. All of Johnson and associates’ early studies investigating anticipation focused exclusively on the struggle to avoid stuttering and on the ability of cues that are evocative of past memories of stuttering to cause stuttering. The findings from these studies led Johnson to conclude that ‘‘expectation of stuttering is one of the psychological factors related to precipitation of the moment of stuttering’’. Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis allows for the possibility that the anticipation of imminent struggle may be precipitated by the speaker’s perceptions of the listener, including anticipation of listener miscomprehension, anticipation of a negative listener response, or indeed anticipation of any listener-related stimulus whatsoever that in the past has led the speaker to respond with tension and fragmentation. We consider how the anticipation of struggle may cause this mechanism to malfunction. Beyond a certain point, efforts to increase clarity and accuracy of speech result in a maladaptive increase in disfluencies. It is also possible that recurrent experiences of communication difficulty stemming from environmental factors, such as listeners’ poor comprehension abilities may lead some speakers to develop unrealistically high expectations of how accurately they need to speak. ​ Conclusion: Insofar as the VRT hypothesis identifies stuttering as a condition that arises due to difficulty achieving an optimal balance between fluency and accuracy. The VRT hypothesis predicts that the most ‘cost-efficient’ ways of maintaining fluency in real-life speaking situations may be through cultivating a willingness to reduce prosodic stress on words that the speaker anticipates are likely to precipitate stuttering, and by continuing to move on to the next sound, regardless of how clearly or accurately the last sound or word was uttered.