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 used brain imaging to see neurological changes after two types of stuttering treatment. Some of the stutterers did fluency shaping stuttering therapy, in which they prolonged their vowels to slow […]

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 […]

Two studies suggest that thiamin (vitamin B-1) may reduce stuttering. One study was of children; the other study investigated adults who stutter. The Hale Study A 1951 study investigated thiamin with a unspecified number of children. Each child received either 30 mg of thiamin (vitamin B-1) or a placebo for one month, and then the […]

A stutterer goes to a two-week intensive stuttering therapy program on the east coast. When he comes back his friends ask him, “How was it?” The stutterer takes a deep breath, pauses, then slowly responds, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” His friends are amazed! They say, “You didn’t stutter once!” The stutterer […]

My biggest speech breakthrough was in 1995. I’d built an electromyographic (EMG) biofeedback device that measured my respiration, vocal folds, lips, jaw, and tongue muscle activity. As I tensed my speech-production muscles, a row of 16 lights went from green to yellow to red. The yellow lights switched on delayed auditory feedback (DAF) and frequency-shifted […]

The journal Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in the Schools (LSHSS) recently published a letter authored by 113 stuttering experts. The co-authors were mostly Ph.D. speech-language pathologists, but also included leaders of organizations such as the Stuttering Foundation, the National Stuttering Association, and Friends. Almost “everyone who is anyone” in the field of fluency disorders […]

In 2003 I was in an acting class. We wrote, directed, and performed an original play. After the final performance a friend videotaped me asking audience members what they thought of me stuttering in the play. First Interview WOMAN: I thought you did a great job. And at first I didn’t know if it was […]

There are two types of foundations: A catalyst foundation works on “a problem for which a strategy is inconceivable, inappropriate, or premature…without specifying or expecting particular outcomes.” A catalyst foundation provides expressive giving that “reflects a donor’s desire to show support for a cause…without necessarily expecting to achieve a noticeable impact.” A driver foundation works […]