Why Stutter?

The only hospital in the U.S. devoted exclusively to people who stutter, lisp, mumble, use baby talk, are tongue-tied or have cleft palates* is Manhattan's National Hospital for Speech Disorders. Last week the hospital, founded by Dr. James Sonnett Greene, celebrated its 25th anniversary, announced that it had treated a total of more than 38,000 children and adult patients (70% without payment), had helped most of them to normal speech.

More than half the hospital's 3,500 patients last year suffered from stuttering, scientifically known as dysphemia. It is found in nervous, high-strung persons, may be caused, according to some speech experts, by a slight injury to the hypothalamic area in the base of the brain. The injury is aggravated by psychological troubles such as shocks, accidents, unhappy home life. A large proportion of twins are stutterers; there is also a close correlation between left-handedness or am bidexterity and stuttering.

Children who stutter seldom outgrow it without proper training. Nor can it be cured by such customs as holding pebbles in the mouth, swinging the arms, or crawling on all fours. Main goal of Dr. Greene's treatment is to calm down stutterers of all ages, make life easy for them.

Dr. Greene "socializes" his patients with parties, games and plays. They are given simple, mechanical tasks to develop muscular coordination, are also taught to speak into a microphone, for it serves as a focus of attention. As soon as a patient enters the hospital, he is given a complete physical examination and recordings are made of his speech so he can gauge his progress. A new clinic to study the brain wave patterns of stutterers will soon be opened in the hospital.

Less difficult to treat than stuttering are the three other main types of speech defects:

Dysphonia, or voice defect, is generally a psychological ailment, although it may be caused by disease of the larynx. It often occurs in frightened opera singers or public speakers, and requires psychiatric treatment.

Dysphasia, failure to arrange words in the proper order, or loss of memory for certain words, is due to a brain injury, which may be caused by paralysis, disease, or hemorrhage. Such patients can be taught to make their speech more intelligible.

Dyslalia is a malady caused by poor speech habits or by defects in the organs or brain center of speech. If a patient has no soft palate, he cannot pronounce k and g; if he has no hard palate, he has trouble with t, d, n, r, 1; if he has a harelip, he cannot make the sounds p, m, f, v, w. Such people need surgical treatment, or perhaps a mechanical palate. Their main problem is to expel air through the mouth, not the nose. To learn this, they blow soap bubbles and rubber balloons, sometimes hold to their lips an "airflow indicator"--a gadget consisting of a wheel which revolves when air escapes from the mouth, a paper which flutters when air is exhaled from the nose.

*There are 13 million people in the U.S. with speech defects.

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