A listener’s perception of being heard plays a key role in a person’s stuttering.
- People with stuttering do not have a speech disorder when they are “talking alone”, that is, when they are alone.
- The mere perception of being heard by a listener would trigger their stuttering.
- The potentiality of a listener introduces the possibility that the speaker is socially evaluated.
About a third of people who stutter have social anxiety disorder. This social pressure is strongly felt by people who stutter, to the point that it could even be the trigger. This is what American researchers from the University of New York Steinhardt suggest in a study published on September 9 in the Journal of Fluency Disorders.
Only stutterers have fluent speech
Researchers believe that people with stuttering do not show speech impairment when they are “talking alone”, that is, when they are alone. The mere perception of being heard by a listener would trigger their stuttering. “There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that people who stutter do not stutter when speaking alone, but this phenomenon has not been confirmed in the laboratory, mainly because it is difficult to create conditions in which people believe that they are really alone”, adds Professor Eric S. Jackson, lead author of the study.
To verify this theory, the researchers conducted experiments on 24 stuttering adults. They assessed them under five different conditions: during conversational speech, reading aloud, private speech in which participants had to think no one was listening, private speech repetition for two listeners, and spontaneous speech. With the exception of private speech, all conditions involved participants speaking or reading to others.
The fear of being judged
Results: during private speech was the only condition in which cases of stuttering were non-existent. “We developed a new method to convince participants that they are alone – that their speech would not be heard by a listener – and found that stuttering adults did not stutter under these conditions.noted Eric S. Jackson. I think this proves that stuttering is not just a ‘speech’ problem, but at its core there must be a strong social component.”
For the authors of the study, the simple potentiality of a listener introduces the possibility that the speaker is socially evaluated. When a speaker speaks in private, there is no social component and therefore he is not concerned with perception or judgment. For researchers, the next step is to conduct studies on children to understand how stuttering develops and is influenced.
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