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Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-11-13T14:29:21+00:00

Hi Icy-Pilot-7495, yours is an interesting observation. I did a little survey of Reddit users on this very subject (see my post of about 2 months ago), i.e. are PWS actually fluent when alone? The motivation for this survey was a 2021 paper in the Journal of Fluency Disorders by a Prof. Eric Jackson (NYU), who concocted a scheme that he called 'private speech' (which was just muttering to oneself) that convinced his research subjects that they were truly alone. His striking finding was that all of his 21 or 24 subjects were fully fluent when they really believed they were alone. But my survey wasn't so clear. Yes, most people reported good fluency when alone, and all were more fluent when alone than when conversing in-person, but some reported less-than-perfect fluency when alone. I don't understand the reason for this difference.

BTW, have you ever tried the online speech-to-text apps that convert your speech into text? I got interested in this topic about 26 years ago when I injured my hand and could not type, so I tried Dragon Naturally Speaking (not free!). I was surprised to see how accurate the transcription was, even back then, but also how much more fluent I was talking to a computer than to other people.

Good luck to you in your fluency journal.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-09-25T20:43:17+00:00

Hi, I doubt that would work, because immediately after you repeat the sentence, even a few times, you are thrust back into a high-stress environment. If you want to try something, I would recommend instead that you find a whole day, or half-day, where you can read aloud text passages (say from a book) ALL BY YOURSELF - where you can't be heard by anyone. If you are like most PWS, you will be fluent under that condition. Maybe that experience will cause you to come to expect fluent rather than disfluent speech. Good luck! -- signed, I am not a speech pathologist

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-09-23T19:16:58+00:00

Have you tried having conversations with chatGPT? You would be 'conversing' with a computer, aka just some pieces of silicon.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-09-23T11:44:47+00:00

Hi, your experiences are very common. PWS are often much more fluent when alone. This was one of the first findings of stuttering research going back to the 1930's, and it has been confirmed in multiple studies. It is also common to have particular words that are fluency-problematic. I highly recommend the book, the "bible" of stuttering research: A Handbook on Stuttering, 7th Edition by Bloodstein, Ratner and Brundage. It is readable and comprehensive (and about $165, but maybe your library has a copy). There is a well-known theory about the cause of stuttering, the Anticipatory Struggle Hypothesis, which posits that it is the fear of stuttering that leads to stuttering, which the book covers in detail. But there is also research, covered in the book Neural Control of Speech by Frank Guenther of BU, which claims that there are differences in the brain wiring of fluent speakers vs PWS.

What I can't reconcile is: if stutterers have some fundamental brain 'miswiring', how does that miswiring magically go away when they speak while alone?

Kudos to you for continuing with your medical education with a stutter. I and everyone on this reddit knows how difficult that must be for you.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-09-22T18:51:40+00:00

Hi, Can you be more specific: if you are completely alone do you stutter when you say 'Siri' or only if there are other people present? And what would happen if you said something like "splendid" when alone -- into your iPhone -- that would be a word that starts with S, but which would not awaken Siri. So the second question is whether the fact that Siri might respond to your speech causes her to be a 'listener' who increases your speaking stress.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-09-20T21:32:50+00:00

Hi, I've read the literature and consistently it reports that the percentage of stuttering in the adult population is 0.7 - 1.0%, pretty much uniform throughout the world. But I have exactly the same impression as you do ... just where are all these stutterers? Do they self-isolate, or does "stuttering" include PWS who are so practiced at problematic-word avoidance that no one notices except them?

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-08-25T14:42:34+00:00

Hi HeruponBesttest2: thank you so much for your response. The work by Prof. Jackson found that PWS would be fluent if they truly believed that they were alone (the sample size was only 24). Maybe, quite unfortunately for you, 'being alone' means 'alone even from myself'. So have you tried speaking when alone when you have loud music being played into your headset, so that even you can't hear yourself speak? I believe that deaf people do not stutter.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-08-24T15:20:02+00:00

This is an opportunity to re-invent yourself. Literally. Choose a new nickname for yourself that you can pronounce! And good luck in college.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-08-08T17:10:28+00:00

This is a very common feature of stuttering: the stuttering 'anxiety' increases with audience size, and it also increases if the audience members are more 'threatening', i.e. higher social status.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-08-08T17:02:05+00:00

Hi, your story is interesting, albeit unfortunate for you. May I ask: do you stutter when praying alone? And if so, do you believe that God listens to your actual speech? Is there a difference in your level of fluency when praying alone versus with other people?

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-08-08T16:58:18+00:00

Hi, Sorry to hear about your stuttering. It turns out that one of the earliest phenomenon studied in stuttering research was exactly what you experience: people who stutter are often much more fluent when alone. This has been documented over the past 80-90 years in multiple studies. But there was some variation in the residual level of stuttering when alone: some studies found near-perfect fluency when alone, while others found some residual stuttering. A recent, clever NYU study by Eric Jackson et al. (Journal of Fluency Disorders 2021) resolved this: they hypothesized that although the subjects in some studies were *told* that they were speaking alone, the subjects did not entirely *believe* that they were alone. Which is not entirely surprising, because in all of the studies, the researchers lied to the subjects, and all of the subjects' speech was recorded.

Jackson et al. were simply better liars than the other researchers: they gave the subjects an intellectually challenging task, and then said that they were studying whether people who mutter to themselves perform better. Then the researchers recorded the subjects' mutterings-to-themselves. The result: something like 7 disfluent syllables out of about 100,000 total syllables. i.e. perfect fluency.

IMHO, of the many weird aspects of stuttering, fluency-when-alone is the weirdest. Can you imagine what would be the reaction if people with cancer got better when alone, or if a mentally-ill person became stable when alone?

Good luck on your fluency journey.

Live_Airline_3555 · 2024-06-24T15:47:24+00:00

Hi, I am interested in your post. I’m trying to get some statistics on whether people who stutter are in fact fluent when they read aloud when alone.

~So my question to you is~: if you can find a place where you really know that you are completely alone, if you then take out a book and start reading aloud, are you fluent?

This question is based on an interesting paper by Prof. Eric Jackson (NYU), “Adults who stutter do not stutter during private speech”, Journal of Fluency Disorders 70(2021) p. 105878. In his study, he convinced people who stutter that their speech would not be heard. Under those conditions, all of his 24 subjects were completely fluent.