Epidemiology In Stuttering

On the first day of school I was in a class full of students. Oh, I hated my first day of classes very much because I could not handle the thought of having to introduce myself to everyone especially with the problem I had. I sat there nervously as I observed the others confidently and happily introducing them self to the audience. I just had the urge to slip under my chair and just hide there until I could escape my turn. Unfortunately, I could not avoid my turn and ended up introducing myself. "HiiiimynameeisJaskiran." As my face filled with embarrassment and humiliation, I thought of all the possible thoughts that approached the minds of the other students in response to me attempting to introduce myself. All too common I could imagine students saying, "Did she happen to forget her name?", "Can she talk a little slower?", or "What is wrong with her?". Times like this, made me wonder about my lack of speech skills in front of a group of people. Why do I either speak so fast-- where what I say sounds like one word-- or when I speak I am not able to clearly pronounce the syllables of a word? As I began to research, I realized this difficulty, complicated style of speaking is called stuttering. Why do people stutter? A mystery that has yet to be unraveled.

neurogenic stuttering occurs when there is damage done to the brain that results in a person stuttering. this could make communication difficult with others as the damage of the brain of the individual continues to make the individual stutter. not to be confused with psychogenic stuttering that occurs due to psychological trauma that was caused. however these two do not occur as frequently as development stuttering. stuttering can lead to the disfluency of an individual during a conversation with another

Stuttering affects about 4% of the population but only 1% of the population will have a long term affect. (Bloodstein & Bernstein Ratner, 2008) Stuttering usually occur when children are learning their speech and language skills but stuttering is most treatable when children are 2-5 years due to the neuronal plasticity. (Yairi, Ambrose, & Cox, 1996) Not all stuttering will disappear during preschool age and will lead into adolescent and adulthood which can have long-term effects on their cognitive function such as emotional and psychological development.

Secondary behaviors of stuttering are learned responses to the disorder. They usually occur when the speaker is trying to get out of being stuck on a word with a physical movement or the speaker thinks he is going to get stuck and does something to prevent. Overall, I think Nate’s speech is quite smooth. His secondary behaviors are reflected by nodding his head heavily and avoid eye contact to help get the words out. He also does eye blinking when he is having trouble to say the word.

Nye et al., (2013) performed a meta-analysis looking at behavioral stuttering interventions for individuals ages 2-18. The review concluded that clinicians have limited high-quality research to base interventions for PWS (Ney et al., 2013). There is a need for high quality trials that compare treatment and non-treatment groups and trials that compare two different treatment programs (Ney et al., 2013). It would be interesting to examine the effects of DAF and fluency shaping when implemented together to measure the outcomes on fluency, natural sounding speech, and if fluency is maintained after

Yaruss (2004) introduces childhood stuttering as a communication disorder characterized by atypical disfluencies that interrupt the smooth flow of speech. Some disfluencies, such as phrase repetitions, revisions, interjections, and pauses, are common in the speech of typically developing children; however, atypical disfluencies such as prolongations, blocks, and part or whole-word repetitions may be indicative of developmental, or childhood, stuttering (Yaruss, 2004). Byrd and Gillam (2016) describe secondary stuttering behaviors, such as eye blinking, lip pursing, or arm flapping, that are adaptive compensations a child who stutters (CWS) may develop as a way to escape or avoid stuttering.

Throughout this 16-week course, I have learned about numerous types of communication disorders. Learning about all of these disorders brought my attention to the varying degrees of disorders and the effects they have on both children, adolescents, and adults. Nonetheless, the disorder that caught my attention the most was stuttering. The main reasoning behind this is because it’s a disorder that, although more apparent in children, has the ability to affect individuals of all ages. In addition, the etiologies behind these disorders are fascinating to me. Therefore, this lead me to wanting to do more research on this disorder which, subsequently, lead me to choose stuttering for my final project and paper.

After reviewing the literature regarding stuttering and the effects on the cognitive function, long term stuttering would lead to emotional and psychological distress for the individual. . Social anxiety in stuttering has been linked to humiliation, embarrassment and avoiding social situations which can affect their quality of life. There is no cure for stuttering, but there are ways to reduce stuttering such as attending speech therapy and receiving social support from family and friends which can increase self- esteem. People that struggle with stuttering must overcome their fear of speaking and willing to acceptance their speech. If individuals continue to avoid treatment or allow their speech to control them, this will impact their quality

While stuttering involves speech, its roots generate from the brain. The brain areas that are involved with stuttering are the temporal lobe, containing the auditory cortex, and the frontal lobe; more specifically, the temporal lobe plays a big role in how stuttering is caused (Rojas, et al.). One study demonstrated the origin of stuttering in the brain. The study first began with which brain structures is implicated in proper language development. The study was done on 15 individuals with autism, and results were compared with 15 people who did not have autism. Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology in order to measure the amount of gray matter that existed in the temporal lobes of the individuals with autism, specifically

Prevalence and incidence : 5% of the population has experienced developmental stuttering and 1% of the population continues to experience stuttering into childhood and beyond Highest rate of fluency disorders occurs simultaneously with the burst of language simultaneously with the burst of language (2 through 3 years old) Boys are affected more than girls with a ratio of 1 out of 4.We do not know who will recover from Stuttering naturally, we do not know what kids are going

The first article read was Max & Gracco’s piece on coordination between oral and laryngeal movements. The article compared the stop gap (SG), voice onset time (VOT) and devoicing interval (DI) between adults who stutter and nonstuttering adults, to determine if the coordination of the muscles of the oral and laryngeal apparatuses has an effect on PWS. They found that while there were some differences between PWS and nonstuttering individuals, they could not correlate the coordination oral and laryngeal speech movements to timing difficulties that impact stuttering. They did find that the relative timing of speech movements between PWS and nonstuttering individuals was the same, but that the actual time for PWS was delayed from the nonstuttering

It is often the case where stuttering can easily be controlled in therapy, however, in a naturalistic environment, where individuals are engaging in multiple tasks that might interfere with each other, controlling stuttering even with a fluency technique becomes a challenge. This is an important study for clinicians to be aware of in order to be able to assist PWS with managing fluent speech while they participate simultaneously in a higher cognitive or linguistic

Stuttering is often observed in children and can persist into adults, although it will often be resolved before puberty (Plante & Beeson, 2012). Asim’s fluency disorder started in childhood, but he does not know what caused him to start stuttering. His theory as to how he started stuttering is that it is hereditary. Asim’s dad also stuttered, and so he thinks it was his genetics that may have caused him to start stuttering. His other theory is that he started stuttering due to one of the traumatic experiences he had in his young life. Although it is widely accepted that traumatic disturbances do not induce stuttering in children (Plante & Beeson, 2012), that is Asim’s personal opinion on a possible cause of his disorder.

Although this drug appears to be treating speech deficiencies, there are a few errors with the study’s design. The problem with this study is that the treatment group came from Dr. Robertson who specialized in helping aspiring actors with their stutters, and the placebo group came from Dr. Smith who specialized in treating children with delayed verbal development. The study should of had a mixture of subjects from each doctor in both the treatment and placebo groups. Since Dr. Smith treated children, whereas Dr. Robertson treated patients who were aspiring to be actors, gives the assumption that the treatment group was older than the placebo group which could potentially cause an error in the study. To fix this study, the researchers should of used people relatively around the same age and to improve the study even more it would help if they had used subjects who had the same speech deficiency, such as only stuttering.

Stuttering is a communication disorder that affects the fluency of speech. This disorder causes disruptions in speech sound such as prolongation and repetition of words. In some cases, disfluencies are classified by using the words ‘um’ or ‘uh’ too often. Stuttering involves secondary behaviors such as escape and avoidant behaviors. Some physical escape behaviors include trembling jaw and nodding head. Those who stutter struggle with avoidance behaviors which include a word, sound, and speech avoidance. Speech-language pathologist differentiate speech disfluencies by classifying it as between-word and within-word speech disfluencies. Between-words are typical and non-stuttered which include phrase repetitions and interjections. Within-word is typical and stuttered which include sound/syllable repetitions, audible sound prolongations, and inaudible sound