The Essentials Of Stuttering: Disruption In Speech

Stuttering
Stuttering is a speech pattern that contains an abnormally high frequency or duration of disruptions in the forward flow of speech affecting its continuity, rhythm, rate, and effortfulness. A disruption in speech is called a disfluency. We all have disfluencies in our speech, such as “uh”, “um”, pausing, or rewording, but it is only considered stuttering when we are disfluent more than ten percent of the time.
The Essentials of Stuttering
Fluency is the effortless flow of speech. There are four parts to fluency: continuity, rate, rhythm, and effort. Stuttering affects all four parts. Continuity is the smoothness of speech. It is decreased by how often and where pauses happen in speech and by how many extra sounds are added. Rate
It is not known, however, if these neurological differences are the cause of the result of stuttering (or both). Research done shows physical differences in several brain areas associated with speech and language skills. Such results may indicate that theses physical differences create competing commands that may interfere with fluent speech. However, and alternate view is that these neurological differences may develop in stutterers during early childhood due to the child’s attempts to voluntarily control or monitor disfluencies (Ramig &
This theory operates on classical conditioning. The speaker learns to associate speaking with a negative emotional response. According to this theory, stuttering is an automatic reaction to a learned stimulus. Somehow and easy, normal disfluency becomes paired with an event that makes the child become tense. From then on, a disfluency is tense (a stutter) even without the event. Some examples of what might trigger this are the child’s location during a stutter, sounds that occurred during a stutter, people or gender of persons listening to the stutter, talking on the phone during a stutter, and words or sounds said during a stutter. These things can all accidentally happen during a stutter, which gives these things the power to make a person stutter tensely when they happen again. Then, when the person who stutters does something on purpose to get out of the stutter, such as jerking their head or blinking their eyes, and the stutter stops, that behavior is now conditioned to stop a stutter in the person’s head. For example a child might think, “The phone rang while I was trying to talk to my friend this morning and I stuttered. The next time the phone rings while I am talking, I will stutter”