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Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:54 Causes of Stammering or Stuttering
1:36 Signs and symptoms
2:53 Diagnosis for Stammering or Stuttering
3:05 Treatment
• Stuttering, or stammering, is a speech disorder that is also known as diffluent speech.
• Stuttering specifically includes the following:
• An uneven rate of speech
• Halted or interrupted speech production, and
• Repeated words, syllables, and sounds
• Stuttering is a highly common phenomenon, affecting between 5 to 10% of all children.
• It mostly occurs in children between 2 and 6 years of age.
• While most children will not carry a stutter beyond childhood, 25% of children who don’t lose their stutter will be affected by it as adults.
• Intervening early can help a child stop stammering and nullify all chances of them carrying it into adulthood.
• Let’s take a deeper look into stuttering:
Causes
• The most common causes of stuttering or stammering include:
• Family dynamics
• Neurophysiology
• Issues in development during childhood
• A family history of stuttering
• Furthermore, injuries and trauma can also result in stuttering.
• Sustaining an injury to the brain from a stroke can cause stuttering.
• Similarly, severe emotional trauma can also cause stuttering.
• Stuttering is believed to run in families as the part of the brain that governs speech and language may be abnormally developed across generations.
• Children of parents who have stuttered usually stutter as well.
Signs and Symptoms
• Three different types of stuttering can affect a person.
• Developmental stuttering occurs while a child is developing their speech. Their mouth may take time to build up their language abilities.
• The developmental type goes away without treatment.
• Neurogenic stuttering occurs when there are abnormalities between the brain’s signals and the nerves or muscles of the body.
• Psychogenic stuttering originates from the brain, specifically the part that regulates speech and learning.
• The symptoms across all these types are the same, and they include:
• Frustration in trying to communicate
• Occasional refusal to speak
• Noticeable physical changes in the face, such as facial tics, extensive eye blinking, lip tremors, and increased tension in the upper face area
• Pausing or hesitation when starting to speak
• Interjections or extra sounds while speaking
• A tense voice
• Rearranging words while speaking
• Stretching out words with longer sounds
• Repetition whilst speaking
• Often, children are not aware that they are stuttering and may get used to how they speak.
Diagnosis
• There is no invasive test to diagnose stuttering.
• The diagnosis can be made by a speech-language pathologist based on the symptoms exhibited by a person.
Treatment
• Most stuttering does not require treatment as children grow past the developmental stage and stop stuttering with time.
• Speech therapy is the most common treatment for other kinds of stuttering.
• Speech therapy can help with intonation and can also reduce interruptions while speaking.
• It gives a person the push they need to stop stuttering. It helps increase self-esteem and helps with pronunciation and enunciation.
• Beyond speech therapy, electronic devices such as voice recorders and hearing aids can also help.
• The former helps repeat what has been said and learn where the mistakes lie while hearing aids can help reduce background noise and increase focus.
• Beyond this, no specific medication is known to help with stuttering.