In this sound week organized by UNESCO, the theme of music remains at the heart of the debates, in particular its effect on stuttering.
- Stuttering affects both children and adults and affects around 600,000 people in France.
- It is a speech disorder characterized by numerous repetitions of words. Genetics is the number one cause of stuttering.
- Singing, in particular, could help people who stutter to have a smoother flow of words.
Stuttering is characterized by a disorder of verbal language fluency. This disturbance causes a repetition of words and syllables. Managing these uncontrollable repetitions is not always easy and often causes shame or embarrassment for the person affected.
Speech therapy remains the first-line treatment. Music could be part of it.
Music may have a beneficial effect on language disorder
“Background music can help people stutter less simply because they hear less of their own speech production, allowing them to be more fluent. assures Anne-Lise Guiraud, president of the hearing institution.
This could also happen through singing because “uno one who stutters, no longer stutters when they sing”. A phenomenon that could be explained in several ways. On the one hand because “language is mainly in the left hemisphere of the brain, music mainly in the right hemisphere, and as stuttering has a rather left-sided origin, singing will short-circuit what is blocking this side“, et on the other hand, because the act of singing remains different from speaking: “there is not this pressure among people who stutter, of having to speak which is a very stressful thing for them”.
Singing to improve brain plasticity?
According to Brain Research Foundationbrain plasticity (also called neuronal plasticity) is “the brain’s ability to recover and restructure itself. This adaptive capacity allows the brain to recover after trauma, disorders or lesions but also to reduce the impact of neurodegenerative diseases.”.
Anne-Lise Guiraud explains a point about the therapeutic link between singing and the regeneration of neurons: “If we manage to develop fluent speech, we will modify the brain, and the mechanisms of cerebral plasticity mean that the less we stutter, well… the less we stutter! Singing therapy is relatively effective for stuttering and deserves to be developed further.”
