It is estimated that over three million Americans stutter. Patricia Zebrowski, PhD, associate professor, speech pathologist and audiologist at the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, talks about stuttering:
Typically, who is it that stutters?
Stuttering is a disorder of childhood. It's a problem that begins anywhere from two to four years of age, typically, in both boys and girls. It's a problem that decreases in probability the older an individual gets. So if you have a 10-year-old child or an 11-year-old child who's never shown a stuttering problem, chances that he or she will stutter are very small. Most of the individuals we see are children, and then adults who have not recovered from the problem in childhood.
What causes stuttering?
For years we thought that it was a problem in nature, so it's either a neurological problem or a psychological problem or a problem in environment. Now we appreciate stuttering as the result of a very complex interaction between the individual's skills and abilities and environmental reaction to those skills and abilities. So it's not just one thing, but more like a recipe with a number of different ingredients.
How is stuttering diagnosed?
Well, the only way that we can diagnose the problem is to collect a speech sample from an individual and we go in and we measure the amount of speech disfluency produced, but more importantly we look to see what types of speech disfluency the person produces. If a child, for example, is producing a large number of repetitions of individual sounds - la, la - like that; or prolonged sounds - l-l-l-l-l -like that, then the probability is higher that the child is stuttering or at risk.
Does stuttering ever just go away with age?
Yes, in fact the odds are always in a child's favor that they will outgrow the problem and the research that we've done and that has come from other labs around the country have shown that about 75 percent of children who begin to stutter in early childhood get better on their own. What that means is they outgrow the problem without therapy. If recovery is going to occur, it usually does anywhere from six months to 36 months after the problem is first noticed. So there's a window or an interval at which the likelihood is highest that kids are going to get better on their own.
How is stuttering treated?
If we think the child is likely to recover, then we will work closely with parents and monitor the child's disfluency. If it looks as if the child is not going to recover, or if we are working with someone who is in the 25 percent of people who don't, and stutters until later childhood and adulthood, there are many strategies that we can use to help a person change the way that they talk. They can either change the entirety of their speech, or they can focus on only sort of catching the moments of stuttering and changing them to make them a little bit easier. We also do a lot of work with individuals on their own thoughts and feelings about their stuttering, their concerns about listener reactions; so we not only look at the speech behavior, but we also look at the person's emotional reactions to stuttering and thoughts and beliefs.
Can you cure stuttering?
We'll always ask that question, and I think, and the data show, that you can help someone - a person who stutters can become what I would consider to be normally fluent, that is they're still disfluent but the listening environment really wouldn't notice anything unusual about their talking.
One of the biggest problems, though, is that even though a person may learn to manage their stuttering, they still may think like a person who stutters, so they still may have some of the same fears about talking and avoidances about talking and then that becomes something that may not be curable to any great extent. They'll live with that often for far longer than they'll live with the stuttering.
Are you currently involved in any research with regard to stuttering?
Yes. My research focus has always been on stuttering at its earliest stages, so working with preschool children just beginning to stutter. And right now we're working on two large-scale National Institutes of Health grants where we're looking at children who stutter over time and, specifically, trying to uncover what their relationships might be between speech production and language and temperament; so we're actually looking at the different recipes for stuttering and what they may be.
If someone wanted to learn more about your research, or perhaps participate, is there a phone number they could call?
Yes. They can call the stuttering research lab, it's part of our project, the Iowa Stuttering Project, and there's toll-free number; it's 866-363-1983, and we provide information about the work that we do and we're happy to talk with anyone or send them information. |
