Stuttering

Stuttering, also called stammering, is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is broken by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words, or phrases, as well as involuntary silent periods or blocks in which the stutterer is unable to make sounds. Stuttering is most typically linked with involuntary sound repetition, but it also includes abnormal delay or halting before speech, which stutterers refer to as blocks, as well as the extension of specific sounds, mainly vowels or semivowels.

The biggest problem for many persons who stutter is repetition. Stuttering can range in severity from barely apparent difficulties that are mostly cosmetic to severe symptoms that effectively inhibit spoken communication. Stuttering affects around 70 million people worldwide, or about 1% of the global population.

Stuttering can have a significant influence on a person's ability to function and emotional condition. Fears of having to enunciate specific vowels or consonants, fear of being caught stuttering in social situations, self-imposed isolation, anxiety, stress, shame, low self-esteem, being a possible target of bullying (especially in children), having to use word substitution and rearrange words in a sentence to hide stuttering, or a feeling of "loss of control" during speech are all examples of this.

There are a variety of therapies and speech therapy techniques that can assist some persons who stutter reduce speech disfluency to the point that an untrained ear cannot detect a problem. The quantity of speech therapy required to reduce disfluency would be proportional to the degree of the person's stuttering.