Have you ever met someone who often repeats a syllable or a word, or maybe they get very unusual pauses while speaking? This is called stuttering and it is more common than you might think. About 1% of the world’s population stutters.
Stuttering, also known as stammering, is a disorder that hinders speech fluency and flow. It is pretty common in children while they’re learning how to speak. Around 5% of children go through a period of stuttering.
People who stutter have difficulty speaking. Don’t get me wrong, they know what they want to say, they just get stuck in the words. For years, scientists have disputed what causes stuttering. Modern science might have the answer for it.
Stuttering, as aforementioned, is a communication disorder that involves interruptions or disfluencies in a person’s speech. Some of the common symptoms are prolonging or repeating consonants, vowels, or a sound. Another sign is having difficulty starting a word or a phrase. Also holding prolonging silence pauses between words or syllables, breaking up the words while speaking.
Other symptoms that accompany stuttering are head jerks, clenching fists, rapid eye blinks, and/or facial tics. It’s estimated that around 1% of the world’s adult population stutters, which can be translated to 3 million people. And get this, it is more common in males than females. As a matter of fact, men have three to four times more probability to stutter.
There are two main types of stuttering and the severity of each depends on individuals. The first one is developmental stuttering. This is the most common one. It’s developed during early childhood when speech and language skills develop too quickly.
The second one is called acquired or late-onset stammering. This is a rare type of stammering. It can be developed by teenagers or adults after a head injury, a stroke, or as a result of a progressive neurological condition. This second type can be also caused by the use of drugs or certain medicines.
As it turns out, there are many theories surrounding the causes of stuttering and they all might be correct. Development, as well as inheritance, might be the main factors when stuttering appears. In the meantime scientists continue studying the causes of stuttering, let me tell you what they’ve got so far.
One theory refers to abnormalities in speech motor control, mainly involving timing, sensory, and motor coordination. In other words, some parts of the developing speech system are just not coordinated.
The second theory refers to genetics. It is checked that stuttering runs in families. So genes do play an important role when having stammering. Around 2 in 3 people who stammer have a family history of stammering, which suggests the genes a child inherits from their parents might make them more likely to develop a stammer.
Whether there might not be certainty in what really causes stuttering, there are two important facts we all must take into consideration: first, it is not caused by anything the parents have done. And secondly, people who stutter are normal and, as a matter of fact, they usually do not stutter when speaking to themselves, or when they sing, or when they speak in unison with someone else. What about that?
