Over 70 million people around the world are believed to suffer from stuttering speech impairments, including the President of the United States. Experts continue to study the condition to determine its causes.
A new study suggests that stuttering can be treated by adults who think they are alone and don't need anyone to help them.
It seems that the perception that there is someone listening is what's important. This particular research has a unique aspect. The participants believed that no one was listening to what they said, which provides solid scientific evidence of how different situations can affect the condition.
Eric Jackson, a New York University speech-language pathologist and researcher, says that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that people who stutter do not stutter when speaking alone. However, this phenomenon has not been proven in the laboratory.
Researchers recruited 23 volunteers to test their skills in five scenarios. These included reading aloud, speaking privately (the only scenario that made it seem like no one was listening), repeating private speech for two listeners and having two conversations with researchers.
Participants were given three difficult computer coding tasks for the private speech scenario. These tasks have been known to make people talk to themselves in the past. Participants were also informed that people who spoke loudly while completing the task often did better.
Although the volunteers were told falsely that no one would listen in during the task, they were still being recorded and monitored by researchers. This was the only situation in which stuttering was almost non-existent among all 23 participants.
Stuttering across scenarios. (Jackson and colleagues, Journal of Fluency Disorders 2021).
Jackson says Jackson: "We devised a novel way to convince participants that they are the only ones hearing their speech and discovered that adult stutterers don't stutter in these conditions."
After being informed that they had been deceived afterward, all the volunteers agreed to continue the experiment. Next, we need to ask why the absence of an audience has such an impact on speech fluency problems.
Researchers don't go into much detail about this, but they did note that it could be possible to feel judged or assessed by others when they are around.
A combination of genetics, neurophysics and neurophysics is believed to cause stuttering. The future may offer a way to investigate how social considerations affect children who stutter.
Jackson says that Jackson believes that this is evidence that stuttering doesn't have to be a speech problem. Jackson also states that there must be a strong social component.
The journal Fluency Disorders published the research.
