So what happens to those who persist in stuttering (not insisting, but persisting)? –After stuttering onset, 80 per cent stop stuttering by age 12 without speech therapy. There are those who receive speech therapy in grade school who stop stuttering and of course there are those who stop stuttering without speech therapy. Why? Don’t know! The plasticity of the brain until age 12 or so lends itself to spontaneous adjustments that rectify the central neurophysiological anomaly in the brain that speech therapy can hasten. Those who do not experience the fortuitous central nervous system adjustment continue to stutter. This is called prevalence of stuttering, that is the number of those who can be identified as stutterers. The incidence of stuttering (those who start to stutter) is about 5 times higher, or about 5 percent of the population, which reduces to the roughly 1 per cent of the population by age 12, as described above. The persistent stutterers will continue to stutter for their lifetime, although showing variation in their degree of severity from day to day or from situation to situation. People who stutter (PWS), or stutterers, are not helpless, subject to the vicissitudes of their central fluency anomaly. That […]

Imagine me having a website! I’ve been a speech therapist for 40 years and I stutter. I never grew out of it so I became a professional! That idea of ‘growing out of stuttering’ is an often- heard sentiment. Young kids do grow out of stuttering in the sense that the brain of the very young child who is displaying speech disfluencies is characterized by its plasticity, that is changeability, or its ability to ‘change for the better’. Neuronal pathways are not ‘set’ yet and therefore can change anatomically and physiologically in time with further development so that the production of normal speech fluency can be established. What does this mean? It means that the three components of speech, respiration, articulation and phonation are synchronized. The brain is successfully guiding motor movements, the speech musculature, so that specific speech muscle patterns are coordinated. This is an unconscious phenomenon. Kids don’t consciously learn to speak, but are able to do so when maturation occurs as the speech apparatus operates to express the thoughts that the language represents. We now know that the etiology or cause of stuttering is physiologically based. When the central neurophysiological anomaly in the brain is active it […]