What is stammering? If you listen carefully to any public
speaker, you will detect many instances of dysfluency. There
will be `em's or `er's. There will be many repetitions of
words or phrases. If you stop listening to the content of the
speech and just count the non-fluencies, you will be amazed
at how many you find. This is prepared speech of a practiced
and often gifted speaker. No one will call it stammering.
Yet, when a child of three or four begins to speak with the
same non-fluencies, many parents begin to worry.
There are no clear-cut answers to the baffling problem of the
causes of stammering. Anything, it seems, can trigger it off.
Parents, when asked whether they can think of any cause for
the stammer, may report that their child copied another one
at school. Or the death of a close relative may have started
it. Perhaps it was the birth of a new baby in the family. A
mother might recall that it began after a dog nearly bit her
child, when he had whooping cough, when Mother went into the
hospital. The list is endless. Sometimes parents claim it
started when he started school, but sometimes they simply
admit, "We don't know." From these examples, we have some
idea of the conditions under which stammering is sometimes
said to begin, but exactly why it begins is still a
mystery.
There have been many theories about the causes of stammering.
Some theories have been investigated over and over again.
There have been over two hundred studies arising from one
theory that trying to train a left-handed child to become
right-handed causes him or her to stammer. Thousands of books
and articles have been written on it. In the U.S., they call
it stuttering, but the two words are synonymous. Numerous
suggestions have been put forward as to the possible causes,
however, scientific research into stammering only began
around 1925.
The numerous books and articles are written from different
points of view. Writers often disagree about the cause, or
causes. Particularly when there is a history of stammering in
the family, some parents will be more likely than others to
notice their child's normal non-fluencies, and suspect that
he is beginning to stammer. Once parents begin to suspect
stammering, they will react negatively to it and try to
correct it. It has been said that "A stammer begins not in
the mouth of the child but in the ear of the parent."
Stammering does seem to run in families; sometimes it is an
uncle, a great-uncle or a cousin, occasionally the parent.
There are perhaps two or three in the whole extended family.
In these families, a child under certain conditions of stress
may begin to stammer because he is predisposed to do so.
Another point of view is that a child may begin to stammer
because there is too much stress in his life. Many children
can take great amounts of pressure, but this particular one
can take so much and no more. Then some trauma, which may be
quite trivial, as we have seen, is the last straw which
breaks the camel's back, and the child's speech deteriorates
under the strain.
Many parents agree that their child comes under the category
of one of these possible causes of stammering. But there are
still many families where the child's non-fluencies have not
been `corrected,' where there is no family history of
stammering and where the child has never been under any undue
stress.
It is believed that about one percent of the total adult
population stammers, and it has been estimated that about
four percent of children do so. So it seems that three
quarters of children outgrow the stammer spontaneously. But
what about the ones who need help to overcome the dysfluency?
And what help is available?
To be discussed in a future article.
