Over the summer, I spent many hours observing speech therapy sessions. While doing this, I met a little boy who has a dysfluency disorder. At first, the child was mortified to talk to me. He would never answer my questions or reply to me when I greeted him. After a few sessions, I approached the child and asked him why this was. His answer was , “because I stutter.” I decided to assume dysfluency as my disorder in order to understand what this child and others like him face on a daily basis.
Stuttering is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases as well as involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the person who stutters is unable to produce sounds.also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to by people who stutter as blocks, and the prolongation of certain sounds, usually vowels andsemivowels. For many people who stutter, repetition is the primary problem.
Stuttering is generally not a problem with the physical production of speech sounds or putting thoughts into words. Acute nervousness and stress can trigger stuttering in persons predisposed to it, and living with a highly stigmatized disability can result in anxiety and high allostatic stress load (i.e., chronic nervousness and stress) that reduce the amount of acute stress necessary to trigger stuttering in any given person who stutters, exacerbating the problem in the manner of a positive feedback system; the name 'Stuttered Speech Syndrome' has been proposed for this condition.[3][4] Neither acute nor chronic stress, however, itself creates any predisposition to stuttering.
The disorder is also variable, which means that in certain situations, such as talking on the telephone, the stuttering might be more severe or less, depending on the anxiety level connected with that activity. Although the exact etiology or cause of stuttering is unknown, both genetics and neurophysiology are thought to contribute. There are many treatments and speech therapy techniques available that may help increase fluency in some people who stutter to the point where an untrained ear cannot identify a problem; however, there is essentially no "cure" for the disorder at present, although many treatments are available.
In the first situation, I walked into a busy dunkin donuts with my brother and placed an order for coffee. Once it was my turn, I placed an order for a large iced coffe with two sugars and a little bit of milk. As i was trying to place the order, I repeated certain sounds and words. One of the men behind the counter stood there patiently as I was tring to order, but the other one kept trying to complete my semtences and tried to guess my order. After various attempts to understand my order, they employee looked over at my brother and asked him to explain what I wanted.
Although placing a simple order seemed like the most impossible task to complete, I decided to stutter while I was at work. Throughout my entire seven hour shift, I stuttered to every customer I assisted. it was a fairly slow day at Macy's, there where not many people shopping. Before I assumed this communication disorder, I let my coworkers know what I was doing The first few customers didn't seem to mind the stuttering. I took out a few handbags, explained the feature
