Help for the Stutterers

ARE you among those persons who are unhappy because they stutter? According to statistics, seven out of every thousand persons have this speech impediment. And it appears that this is true regardless of where they happen to live, in the United States, Europe or Asia. So it is estimated that, all told, some 25 million persons have this problem. Far more children than adults are plagued with it, and males have it four to six times as frequently as females.

Stuttering, let it be noted for your comfort, has nothing to do with intellect. Some of the greatest intellects in history had this problem. The Bible suggests that Moses, a prophet of Jehovah God, had a speech impediment. While its exact nature is not known, Moses’ attitude toward it is typical of that of stutterers.​—Ex. 6:12.

Nature of the Problem

If you are a stutterer you are handicapped when it comes to speaking fluently you​—keep trying but do not succeed, repeating syllables over and over again before getting out what you want to say. Hesitancy, doubt and fear mark your efforts. Research has established that there rarely is any physical difference in the speech organs of stutterers as compared to those who do not have this problem. In fact, there is not even any difference when it comes to performing rapid movements with the tongue, jaws, lips and breathing muscles. Nor do stutterers seriously differ emotionally from others.

As to the details of the problem,, stutterers as a rule have more difficulty in speaking long words than short words; more difficulty with words that start with a consonant; more with the first three words than with the rest of the sentence; more difficulty in speaking meaningful words, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, than in speaking articles, prepositions and conjunctions, and also more difficulty in speaking meaningful sentences than in speaking nonsense ones. Moreover, stutterers find some people easier to speak to​—apparently those friendly and sympathetic or familiar—​than to others. All of this underscores the important role the mind or the emotions play in stuttering.

Research has also shown that stutterers usually have little difficulty in shouting or whispering, or in singinga or in speaking in chorus with others, even though it be just one other person that speaks or reads with them at the same time. Another interesting characteristic is that, if someone gives a stutterer a pair of earphones and has him hear loud noises while he speaks, he will have no difficulty in speaking.

True, it could be that stutterers have a slight hereditary tendency, in that stuttering among children of stutterers is more common than among children of nonstutterers. But, according to some specialists, this may be due more to inherited mental attitudes than to inherited physical defects.

What May Be the Cause

While no striking differences have been detected in the vocal mechanism of stutterers as compared to nonstutterers, it could well be that the larynxes of stutterers are more sensitive or more readily tensed than those of others. So there would be a slight inherited predisposition to stuttering.

It also appears that, as a rule, children start out well, but around the age of three some begin to hesitate or repeat their words and soon begin to stutter. What brings this about? Research has shown that the home environment and the attitudes of the mother, should she be a perfectionist or overly anxious or excessively concerned about the impression her child makes on others, may be the precipitating factor. Stuttering is not necessarily caused by the child’s having undergone some “trauma,” that is, some harmful experience, such as an accident, great fright or serious illness.

So some conclude that a child “learns” to stutter because of the home environment. It is said by some to be the result of instilled doubt and fear, a doubt that causes the child to expect to stutter and then to try not to stutter because of the fear of stuttering. These very factors cause the child to stutter, because the negative emotion inhibits freeness of speech. Even as it is recognized that thinking and worrying about one’s heart can cause it to act up, and having one’s mind on one’s stomach all the time can cause one to have indigestion, so doubts and fears as to speaking can bring about stuttering.

Various Approaches

In 1951 a speech researcher at the University of Illinois developed a device by which he was able to confuse people and cause nonstutterers to stutter. As a person talked, the device caused him to hear his own voice after a short delay. In 1972 a speech specialist in Roanoke, Virginia, lit upon this as a method of treating stutterers, getting the reverse effect with them, so that they spoke without stuttering. He has been getting some good results from this method.

Another speech specialist who has been able to help many stutterers stresses the fact that one stutters because of what one does, not because of what one is. That is, he stutters because he presses his lips together tightly, or holds his breath by tensing the muscles of his throat, and so forth. He stresses that stutterers can and must help themselves.

It would be well if stutterers or parents of stutterers would read books on the subject; one approach may help this one, another approach may help that one. Researchers found that an extremely small percentage of parents of stuttering children ever bothered to do any reading on the subject. So seek help. “To be helped one must be helpable, to be taught one must be teachable,” is the way Wendell Johnson puts it in his book Stuttering and What You Can Do About It.

Among the helpful hints given by this ex-stutterer are five “nots”: Do not expect to stutter; by expecting trouble you invite it. Do not consider stuttering your effective way of speaking just because you manage to speak somehow. Do not think of stuttering as though you were a victim of it instead of your actually causing it by your own efforts,, which is the actual fact. Do not reconcile yourself to the circumscribed role of a stutterer, adjusting and contenting yourself to talk less and letting it affect the kind of job you accept and your social activities; that is merely the easy way out. And do not take the attitude that you cannot help it, but neither go to the other extreme of refusing to admit you have a problem, which is what some do.

Another authority on the subject, Dr. J. P. Brady, stresses a threefold approach: First is retraining speech habits. In this the stutterer is asked by his therapist to read in a slow, relaxed manner. Whenever the stutterer reverts to his old habits, he is stopped and asked to begin again at an easy part of the reading. Secondly, since most stutterers tend to want to speak hurriedly, he recommends the use of a metronome (such as musicians use), starting out the stutterer with one word per second or sixty per minute. As he gains fluency at this pace the rate is gradually increased until he reaches the normal rate. And thirdly, this speech authority uses what he calls “systematic desensitization.” In this the patient is asked to imagine various speaking scenes, starting with the least trialsome, and, as he overcomes their handicap, proceeding on to those that cause him more difficulty, such as speaking into a telephone.

Much in line with the foregoing is the approach, recently brought to the fore in medical journals, used by Dr. M. F. Schwartz, director of the Temple University Speech Research Laboratory. According to him, there is an inherited predisposition of the larynx to become tense, as well as either an overanxious attitude on the part of the stutterer (or on the part of the parent if the stutterer is a child), or a background of some traumatic experience of the stutterer. This problem often becomes evident at the age of three with the effort to learn to speak larger words. This causes the child unconsciously to tense his larynx or voice box and, once he finds difficulty in speaking, he creates a mental block for himself.

Upon receiving this explanation, one stutterer, who had spent $10,000 on his speech problem, having visited nine different speech specialists, a hypnotizer and even a psychotherapist, from whom he emerged merely poorer but still a “well-adjusted stutterer,” said: “For the first time, I understand why I stutter. That’s been a godsend to me; I feel an enormous weight has been taken off my shoulders.”

Emphasizing the psychosomatic factor, Dr. Schwartz stated: “If a stutterer came in here and I told him to remove his shoe and sock and stick his right foot in a bucket of water while he talked to me, he wouldn’t stutter. He would be distracted, and therefore his larynx would relax.”

Dr. Schwartz and his colleagues first explain to stutterers their tendency unconsciously to tense the larynx, as well as teach them to practice deep, abdominal breathing, which produces a softer and healthier voice. Next the patients are taught to bring their lips softly together instead of pursing them tightly, which a stutterer is unconsciously prone to do because of expecting trouble, and then to speak in a soft, easy voice. This kind of speaking, a “new voice,” as it were, short-circuits the stuttering mechanism by altering the position of the larynx or voice box.

However, once he has learned to speak in this manner, the battle is by no means won. The patient must now learn to apply this method of speaking to various situations, for in different situations he will tend to go back to his stuttering kind of voice; such as when talking to members of his family, to those with whom he works or when answering the telephone. Such takes time and effort, and those taking this treatment at a speech clinic are there several hours a day, five days a week. This method by Schwartz is among the most successful ones to date.

Truly, today, more than ever before, there is help for the stutterer​—if he really wants to be helped.

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