Whether
you know someone close to you who stutters or if it's you yourself who
stutters, most of us have come across the term "stuttering" across at
least once in our life time. So what is stuttering really? Well, to answer that
question I would need to go into the details of speech, but to sum it up,
stuttering is a sort of dis-fluency in speech in which words lose their rhythm
and sentences come out with short breaks or spasms.
A
recent case study done by researchers with
the U of A's Institute for Stuttering Treatment and Research
(ISTAR), Harasym and Langevin, worked with Sarah, an eight-year-old
girl, who had a stuttering problem which has started to affect her
academic performance as well as her communication skills with
friends, teachers and family. The treatment the researchers provided included
"practice of prolongation" which encourages Sara to speak at an
exaggeratedly slow rate. It also included breathing techniques and voice management
skills for her to constantly practice at the clinic and at home as well.
You
would think that if stuttering is such a common problem for a lot of people,
then it would not be considered "weird" by society, but you would
indeed be wrong to think that because stuttering has led to a lot of bullying
and social problems for kids in school. At the
end of the study it was shows that Sarah's fluency was improved by 98.6 % which
lead the researches to conclude that "fluency shaping"
did indeed help in improving the speech of kids with Down Syndrome.
This goes hand in hand with Dr. J.D. Trout's research on
fluency heuristics According to Dr.Trout, fluency is "A property of a
psychological process used to measure how easy it is to think about
something". So it makes sense that if you can't think of something very
easily, you struggle with saying it out and thus sometimes end up
stuttering. He said that if we speak incoherently it means that we are not
correctly using our mental work space and all the speech tools we have. Since
Dr. Trout said that practice or repetition makes perfect, it makes sense why
Sarah found it much easier to speak coherently after she practiced the
techniques in the study a lot.
In
the end, as Dr. Trout stated, we have a natural inclination to speak, so it
should come as a sort of “sense of understanding” to be able to speak fluently
because as we all know, great speakers like MLK Jr. or President Obama would
not be/ have been as successful as they were/are if it weren't for their fluent
speech skills. University
of Alberta, “Giving a voice to kids with Down syndrome.” ScienceDaily, 25 Feb. 2013. Web. 6 Dec. 2013
Trout, JD. “Explanation, Fluency, and the
False Climb.” Loyola University
Chicago. 17 September 2013.
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