These 357 words include every combination of consonant and vowel in the English language. Word List 1 able baby chainsaw dateline famous gatepost halo jaywalk cable label mailbag nadir pacer rabies saber shapeless table they vacant weightless whale zany Word List 2 abbey baboon chalice dancer famine gadget hacksaw jasmine cabin ladder macro knapsack package [...]
Many stutterers suffer from social anxiety disorder. Until recently the only evidence-based treatment for social anxiety disorder in stutterers is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which must be provided by a therapist, is lengthy, expensive, and has mixed results. CBT has high cognitive demands for controlled and deliberate processing of threats, on top of most stuttering [...]
I recently read Anders Ericsson's book Peak, about how individuals develop skills and improve performance. Ericsson is a professor of psychology at Florida State University. He developed the concept of deliberate practice and has applied it to music, sports, medicine, and other fields. Ericsson is interested in physical skills, not intellectual knowledge. For example, he [...]
Brain scans find that therapy to slow stutterers' speech changes neurological activity while increasing speaking rate, fluency, and speech naturalness. A $3 million, six-year study [ref]Ingham, R.J., et al. Regional brain activity change predicts responsiveness to treatment for stuttering in adults. Brain & Language (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bandl.2013.10.007[/ref] used brain imaging to see neurological changes after two [...]
Likely you've never met another stutterer. You've never seen a book about stuttering in a bookstore. You may be the first stutterer that your speech-language pathologist has met. You might feel that you're the only person in the world with this problem. Last month your speech-language pathologist printed a webpage for you with the time [...]
Familial Incidence of Stuttering At least 25 studies have investigated whether stutterers are more likely to have relatives who stutter. The results varied so widely that they don't prove anything with certainty. [1] A 1940 study of five generations of an Iowa family, with stuttering in all generations, "proved" that the family had a "tone" [...]
Brain Imaging Studies Brain imaging studies have been done with adult stutterers but not with children who stutter. We don't know whether the neurological abnormalities found in adult stutterers cause stuttering or were caused by stuttering, i.e., whether growing up stuttering causes a normal child's brain to develop abnormalities. Different brain imaging studies found different [...]
Stuttering is a speech disorder with involuntary repetition and prolongation of sounds and syllables, and silent blocks in which the stutterer's vocal folds close and prevent the release of air and the production of sound. These obstacles negatively affect the pace, clarity, and prosody (emotional content) of speech. Stuttering includes abnormally high activity in the [...]
Cluttering Cluttering (also called tachyphemia) is a communication disorder characterized by speech that is difficult for listeners to understand due to rapid speaking rate, erratic rhythm, poor syntax or grammar, and words unrelated to the sentence. One description is speech with "sudden impulsive bursts that are filled with misarticulations and disfluencies." [1] The person with [...]
Why do stuttering experts tout ineffective treatments, and disparage or ignore evidence-based, effective treatments? In my blog post The Ph.D. Effect: How Too Much Education Makes Some People Stupid, I explained how cognitive biases lead stuttering experts to have poorer judgment than non-experts. In this blog post I explain why stuttering experts recommend certain ineffective [...]
