http://www.leomagan.com/stuttering/
Our speech therapist share some information about what the latest brain scanning techniques revealed about how to stop stuttering.
Hello, my name is Magan Chen, and I’ve been a practicing speech therapist for the past 24 years.
Today, I would like to share some information about what the latest brain scanning techniques are telling us about the brains of people who stutter versus people who don’t stutter.
If you are a person who has a stuttering problem, what you’ve probably tried to do is to actually look around at people around you who don’t stutter and try to learn from them.
So maybe you see that they are talking very confidently, they are able to articulate what they say, and they seem to do it all without thinking.
And so a lot of people think that the key to stopping stuttering is to actually just build up your confidence.
Now there are a few problems with this approach. One is that only 1% of the population stutters, and this is quite consistent over different countries, different races and so forth. Alright, 1 %.
So the other 99% of people around you: your friends, your family, may not know what it’s like to have a stuttering problem.
And number two, there’s been a lot of research on stuttering – entire books and courses have been written about this, and so far there’s been no concrete evidence at all to indicate that people who stutter have an confidence issue, or that they are different psychologically from people who don’t stutter.
There’s no particular personality trait that differentiates people who stutter from those that don’t.
They are not more neurotic, they are not more worrying, they are not more passive, they are not more introverted and so forth. So there’s been no evidence at all that confidence or personality actually play a part.
And the third problem is that what we have found through scientific research is that there’s a lot of evidence that for people who stutter, even while you don’t hear any stuttering, their speech is essentially different from people who don’t stutter.
Okay, let me repeat that again: If you are a person who stutters, when you’re producing speech when you’re talking, even when people don’t hear any stuttering, your speech is actually very different from the speech of other people who don’t have a stuttering problem.
So they have found this about even 20 to 30 years back.
The aerodynamics in the speech tract are different, the way the speech muscles are activated are different and so forth.
And now, with modern technology, and the possibility of scanning brains while people are talking, it’s been established that there are very, very fundamental differences.
So what I’ll like to do today is to share information about those differences and I think more importantly, hopefully give you more optimism and hope that by learning these information, you’ll be able to apply them and actually take action about what are the things you can do to improve your fluency and reduce your stuttering.
So what scientific research has found is that there are three main areas that involve when a person is speaking fluently.
One area is more toward the front part of the brain – the technical name is the motor cortex, the area that involves what we call motor planning and execution.
In other words, when I’m talking to you right now, I’m moving my vocal cords, I’m using my vocal cords, I’m using my tongue, I’m using my lips, I’m using different speech muscles, and that’s how I produce different sounds.
So there’s a part of a brain that obviously is more concerned with what we call, the motor planning, planning all the different movements and actually execute them. So these areas are obviously involved in producing speech.
Now there’s a second area of the brain that’s involved as well, and that’s actually more towards the sides, near the ears.
So they are related to what we call auditory feedback. In other words, how you hear yourself and how you perceive yourself.
If you’ve ever tried recording your speech you would know that you don’t hear your own speech the way other people do. When you record your speech on playback, it’s like “oh gosh, did I sound like that? My voice?”
So auditory perception or auditory feedback is about how you hear your own speech, and again it’s been very clearly established that by playing around and manipulating how you hear your speech, let’s say if you put on earphones, and you go through what it’s called delayed auditory feedback (DAF), and you hear your own speech but playback with maybe a split second delay. If you manipulate that, it actually produces fluent speech in people who normally stutter.
In fact, the converse is true: you could do that with people who normally do not stutter, and would actually induce stuttering. Very interesting huh?
So what it tells us is that, the auditory feedback definitely has an impact on how you produce fluent speech.
