The original article was first published in the Autumn
2002 edition of "Speaking Out"
The magazine of the British
Stammering Association.
Since then I’ve updated it to reflect changes in my
own understanding over the past few years.
The
Relationship between Stuttering and the Control of Speech Quality
It is
widely known that trying to speak without stammering usually makes things
worse. Paul Brocklehurst describes
recent research on a new perspective in this area and how he applied it to
himself.
I’ve
stuttered ever since I was a small child and over the years have tried all of
the conventional forms of therapy in the hope of finding some sort of
alleviation. Although some therapies did benefit me in the short term, after a
few weeks or months I always found myself slipping back to my default level. As
I’ve grown older, the stutter has become less severe and I’ve been relatively successful
at adapting my life in ways that allow me to get around it. But I have
continued to feel frustrated at the way it prevents me from fulfilling what I
feel is my true potential when it comes to work and social interaction.
Things
started to change for me at the beginning of this year when, after some
particularly frustrating experiences, I decided that despite my age, 43, I just
had to make a renewed effort and try and do something about my stutter.
During
my search of the internet I found details of a paper that had originally been
published as a chapter in the book ‘Nature and Treatment of Stuttering’. The
paper, Stuttering as a Covert Repair Phenomenon[1]
by Herman Kolk and Albert Postma provided an
explanation for stuttering that was different to any I had ever heard before.
Basically,
Postma and Kolk hypothesise that, when people notice that they’re making a
mistake while speaking (like a garbled or wrongly pronounced word), they tend
to stop and repeat the word that they got wrong, until they are satisfied that
they have got it right (this is called an error repair). They also point out
that sometimes we detect mistakes in our words and try to repair them before we
actually speak them, in which case the repetition is an internal one and all that
a listener is likely to be aware of is a hesitation or silence (this type of
error repair is what they call a covert error repair). In their paper, Postma
and Kolk then suggest that the symptoms of stuttering (repetitions,
prolongations and blocks) might arise when despite repeating a wrong sounding
word over and over; a stutterer is still unable to formulate exactly the sounds
he wants.
Postma and Kolk come to the conclusion that people who stutter might be
somewhat slower than normal at formulating the sounds that make up the
words they want to say. Thus, where a fluent speaker might only need to repeat
a garbled word once in order to get it right, a stutterer may need several
attempts. Moreover, if stutterers are slower than normal at formulating their words,
they would be prone to making an inordinate amount of mistakes if they try to
speak at what would be considered a normal rate. This would explain why by
slowing down or refusing to be rushed, stutterers tend to stutter less.
Having
spent some time digesting these new ideas, I found myself trying to analyse
exactly what I tend to do when speaking. I’ve always been aware that the harder
I try to speak clearly and accurately, the more likely I am to stutter. Perhaps
the most clear-cut example of this is in what happens to my speech if I drink
alcohol. The severity of the stutter can either increase or decrease, depending
on whether or not I try to sound sober. In other words, if I am drunk and am
happy to sound drunk and don’t worry about slurring my words and getting them
mixed up and making lots of mistakes, then the stutter seems more or less to
disappear. Whereas, if I am drunk and I try to sound sober and make a special
effort to speak with as few mistakes and as clearly as possible, the stutter becomes
significantly worse.
Other
people who stutter I’ve spoken to have told me the more they try to avoid
making errors, the more they are likely to stutter. My own feeling is that some
social settings encourage individuals to develop unreasonable expectations with
respect to the level of accuracy they can achieve with their speech. For
example, I was educated in rather posh English private schools in which a high
standard of speech was considered very important. Under such conditions I
naturally exercised a very high degree of control over the quality my speech.
It’s quite possible that if for some reason I was somewhat slower than normal
at formulating the sounds of my words, I may well have been trying to achieve a
level of perfection that was physically impossible for me.
So I
decided to experiment and see what would happen if I made a conscious effort to
just keep going and not correct any mistakes while speaking. Thus, each time I
was talking to someone, I would try to say whatever I wanted to say, without
stopping every time a word failed to materialise or came out wrong. I decided
that if the person I was speaking to didn’t understand me, I could always
repeat the phrase in its entirety, but I would try to give priority to
maintaining the flow and not get bogged down trying to repair mistakes as I
went along. The experience reminded me very much of playing an instrument in an
orchestra. In order to keep up with the rest of the instruments, you’ve just
got to keep going and not worry about the occasional missed or wrong note.
It
took a few days to get into the way of doing it, and I had to overcome a lot of
reluctance to allow myself to speak in what I would normally have considered a
slovenly way, but I did it nevertheless. The result was that I found myself
often sounding a bit like I’d had a stroke. Although I didn’t really stutter,
my words often sounded unclear or garbled. Sometimes in order to keep going I
had to miss words out completely and sometimes it was not easy for people to
understand. But whenever the person I was speaking to was unable to understand,
I simply repeated the whole phrase and it always came out better the second
time. After a few days of practice, I started to feel much less anxious about
speaking, and as my anxiety reduced the number of mistakes I was making also
reduced.
After
a week or so, I was aware that the fear of stuttering was disappearing. I was
still mumbling and making more mistakes than people normally do; but as I was
no longer overwhelmed by high levels of anxiety. After a number of weeks, I
started to feel increasingly confident about my speech and to this day that
confidence continues to grow. I wouldn’t say that the stutter is cured, but it
is as though I’ve started to redefine the processes going on inside me. I can
recognise that if I do try to repair individual speech mistakes as I go along,
I make the same sort of repetitions, prolongations and blocks that I always
did, but now I no longer interpret them as a “stutter”. I simply understand
that repairing errors as one goes along is bound to result in a certain amount
of dysfluency – it no longer feels ‘wrong’ in the way it used to and, perhaps
more importantly, it no longer makes me anxious.
My
personal observations lead me to believe that Postma and Kolk are probably
correct when they say that stutterers have a slower than normal rate of
phonological processing (sound formulation). If this is true, it would follow
that even if a person’s stutter does disappear, they would probably still be
prone to making an above average number of errors when speaking. But that would
be a minor inconvenience in comparison to the agony of stuttering. To me,
the most important thing is not that I speak completely fluently, but that I am
able to understand clearly my physical limitations with respect to speech, and
act within them.
Postma and Kolk’s hypothesis has provided me with a
theoretical model that enables me to understand why I’ve been getting stuck and
what I can do about it. It has also given me insight into how and why some of
the more traditional fluency techniques (like diaphragmatic breathing and
rhythmic speaking) are likely to help in certain situations, and it has helped
me to recognise the value of maintaining a variety of such skills in my
armoury. My experience is that a combination of such practical methods
supported by a clear theoretical understanding of what is going on, has a far
more powerful and lasting effect than simply employing a fluency technique
without understanding how or why it is working.
303a
PE3 6LU
England
paul.brocklehurst@ntlworld.com
Link:
British Stammering Organisation
[1] Kolk, H.& Postma, A. (1997). Stuttering as a
covert repair phenomenon. In Nature and Treatment of Stuttering: New
Directions, Curlee, R.F., & Siegel, G.M.
(Eds.).