Stuttering

What Is Stuttering?

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as Lief the town-crier had spoke my lines.”
Wm Shakespeare Hamlet Act III Sc 2

While Hamlet demanded fluency from his players, fluent speech is a remarkable ability. It is a precise union of respiration, phonation, and articulation initiated and co-coordinated by the brain. Stuttering results when one of the “players” drops the ball. In essence, stuttering is an interruption in the flow (fluency) of speech.

It is estimated that over three million Americans stutter and that 4% of the world’s population has experienced a problem with stuttering at one point in their lives. While the most common form of stuttering (developmental stuttering) occurs in children between the ages of two and six and is normally outgrown as the child matures, stuttering can also be a neurogenic disorder (when the brain doesn’t give the correct signals to the muscles needed for speech). In a few cases, stuttering is a psychogenic disorder brought on by severe stress, anguish, or another mental disorder.

The terms stammering and stuttering were at once time synonymous. In the United Kingdom, the medical term for stuttering is still stammering. In the United States, the medical term for stuttering is dysphemia, taken from the noted speech pathologist, Robert West, who in 1933 defined stuttering as “the manifestation of the condition dysphemia.” Simply translated from the Greek, dysphemia means “bad talk”. However, stuttering is more than just bad talk. Sometimes stuttering may carry over from the verbal and, in addition, is manifested by rapid eye blinks, trembling lips or quivering jaw, grimacing, or other behaviors as the stutterer struggles with the word that has stalled at the tip of his or her tongue.

While all of us have tripped over words at one time or another, clinically, dysphemia is more than just a momentary lapse in the ability to speak clearly. It is a frustrating condition, characterized by sudden and frequent spasms when voice and/or muscle seem to unite only to thwart our best attempts at verbal communication.

“To be or not to be?” Easy for Hamlet to say, but the good news is that, in most cases, stuttering can be overcome. Actor James Earl Jones is a prime example of one who overcame the “dark side” of speech. Most noted as the distinctive voice of Star Wars’s Darth Vader, Jones also distinguished himself as a Shakespearean actor playing roles that included Othello, King Lear, and yes… the words of Hamlet as well have gone trippingly on his tongue!