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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Psychologists have studied the judgment of experts since the Tenerife airport disaster. On March 27, 1977, KLM's top Boeing 747 pilot started to take off on a foggy runway in the Canary Islands. The flight engineer, the lowest-ranking officer in the cockpit and not a qualified pilot, told the pilot that a Pan Am 747 [...]