Stuttering/Stammering

The words Stuttering and Stammering are interchangeable.  In the United Kingdom and India the words stammering is more prevalent.  In the rest of the world the word of Stuttering is normally used.  Both words will be used in this website, depending on the source of an article.

What is Stammering.

Stammering is a speech disorder where the normal flow of words is disrupted.  The disruption can take many forms.  There may be repetitions of a word or a syllable; there may be prolongation of different speech sounds; there may be a complete blockage where the person is trying to say a syllable or word but it just gets stuck and there is no sound for a varying length of time.  This latter problem, the block, is usually accompanied by very tense muscles in the upper half of the body, but specifically, around of the vocal cords.  The  word disruption, used earlier, may be accompanied by certain physical characteristics.  These characteristics can include rapid eye movement; a closing of the eyes; tremors of the lips; a pursing of the lips; and grimace of the face; the movement of arms; hands; tapping the feet or hands; and other struggles with different parts of the body.  The person who stammers usually starts one or more of these characteristics in an attempt to speak.  The attempts may work initially, but within a small space of time can become a habit which in fact does not help at all.  Many stammerers find that they are fluent, or comparatively fluent, in some situations.  For example when singing, stammerers can usually sing without a problem. When speaking alone, or speaking to a pet, many stammerers find themselves fairly or completely fluent.  At the other extreme, speaking to a group of people or talking on the telephone tends to make the stammer more severe.  There are often in between stages of stammering, for example when speaking with a lifetime partner, where stammering is random but passably fluent.

More to come

Thanks to http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/ for providing a basis and framework for this article.





There are a variety of speech fluency disorders, only one of which is stammering.  Speech-language pathologists (SLP) are expected to handle a wide range of disorders.  So only a small proportion of SLPs may specialise in stammering