Some people who stammer have become famous through acting, or found it helps their speech. Paul Brocklehurst takes a closer look to see if there really is a connection.

While booking my place at this year's ISA World Congress, I noticed that its website included a page containing biographical details of a number of individuals who stammer who have been outstandingly successful in careers as singers, actors and politicians. I was struck by how little the lives of these individuals have in common with the stereotypical portrayals of stammerers that one so often encounters, as shy, introverted people who are not good at expressing themselves.

As I read through their biographies, I wondered how easy it would be for us, as people who stammer, to imagine that we too might have the potential to excel at singing, acting or public speaking.

Perhaps, with singing, such a possibility might not be so difficult to imagine. I'm sure many of us will have been encouraged to sing at school and discovered that we can do it well. But I find it harder to imagine that many of us will have received similar encouragement to explore and develop our acting or public speaking skills.

When I left school, I didn't believe I could act, and I might never have learned otherwise were it not for the fact that, some years later, I started going out with an actress. Apparently convinced that acting would do me good, she did her best to persuade me to apply for a place on a drama course.

I did eventually apply, but only because I saw my inevitable rejection as a way of finally putting the matter to rest. I was, after all, quite a severe stammerer. So I was somewhat shocked on hearing that I'd passed the interview. As it turned out, I wasn't the only one on the course who stammered and it didn't take long before I realised that the faith that my girlfriend and the interviewer had shown in my ability to learn to act was not so misguided after all.

Acting unlocked fluency

to give a confident and fluent performance I had to know my part very well.

One of the things I learned from the course was that to give a confident and fluent performance I had to know my part very well. That meant not just learning and remembering the words, but working out in advance the exact pitch, tone and manner with which each word and phrase needed to be expressed. It also meant planning the timing of the movements, gestures and expressions that would accompany the speech. I needed to learn all this so well that when the time came for me to speak the lines, they just came out together with the movements and gestures the way they had been rehearsed. The better planned and rehearsed my performances, the more certain I could be that I could do them without getting stuck.

The ability to speak as an actor did not, however, carry over into an increased level of fluency in every-day life. It intrigued me how it could be so easy to say words when acting, and yet still sometimes be so difficult to say those same words when they cropped up by chance in ordinary conversation. Of course, reciting pre-learned lines is not the same as holding a conversation; but what exactly could it be that makes the one so easy and the other, at least sometimes, so difficult?

Why acting is easier

Last year, a paper by Professor Hans-Georg Bosshardt, from the Ruhr University, Bochum, was published that provided some possible answers to this question. It contained details of a number of experiments in which he and his colleagues had compared how quickly stammerers and non-stammerers were able to perform a variety of language tasks. On the whole, they found very little difference between the two groups of participants. However, individuals in the stammerers' groups were significantly slower than those in the non-stammerers' groups in experiments that required them to simultaneously perform a number of linguistic tasks. They also performed more slowly in experiments that required them to access the meanings of words.

Could multitasking interfere with our speech?

One of the main differences between ordinary conversation and reciting lines or verses that have been pre-learned is that conversation involves more tasks, many of which have to be performed simultaneously, if we wish to converse at a fairly normal speed. For example, in conversation we have to: decide what to say; find the best words to say it with; check to see whether the words have come out with a suitable pitch and loudness; whether the important words have been suitably stressed, whether the listener is listening, whether he has heard what we've said and whether he appears to be understanding it in the way it was intended.

A clue as to why we may not be so good at the sort of multi-tasking that everyday conversation involves can be gained from a number of studies, cited by Bosshardt, in which MRI scans were performed on participants to observe activity in their brains while performing different tasks. The results of these studies suggest that in non-stammerers, language processing and speech production are controlled by two separate and independent parts of the brain; whereas in people who stammer, there appears to be more overlap. These findings led Bosshardt to suggest that in people who stammer, speaking while trying to compose sentences is likely to overload the parts of the brain involved and cause an inordinately large number of speech errors.

Practical effects

Importantly, Bosshardt and his colleagues' findings suggest that if we are able to cut down on the number of simultaneous linguistic tasks we perform during conversation, our fluency is likely to increase.

But how can we cut down? In my experience, doing one thing at a time, (for example, formulating everything I want to say in advance of actually saying it) may be fine when I have plenty of time to practice (such as before acting in a play or lecturing to an audience); but trying to hold an everyday conversation in that way is just not realistic. It would just make it impossibly slow. A more realistic alternative is to see if there are any conversational tasks that are not entirely essential and can be dropped. After much experimentation, I've found that one that I am able to drop, is this: listening to the sound of my own words to check whether they are intelligible. It seems that, for myself at least, the costs of listening to my own words greatly outweigh the benefits. Thus, paradoxically, the less I check my words for intelligibility, the more intelligible they seem to be.

Of course, each of us is different, and what works for me will not necessarily work for you. Moreover, what is appropriate in one situation may not be appropriate in another. For example, there is an increasing body of evidence (from studies of the Lidcombe Program) that suggests that small children who stutter benefit from therapy sessions in which they are encouraged to pay more attention to how their words sound. This makes perfect sense in a therapy session where, similar to a theatrical rehearsal, the aim is improving articulation and pronunciation skills. But in real-life conversational situations, where we have to focus on what we want to say, Bosshardt's findings would suggest that paying attention to how well our words are coming out may overload our ability to speak.

Thus it is possible that the techniques that are most useful during therapy or rehearsals may be fundamentally different to those that are most useful during performances; and the techniques that work when performing - acting or giving speeches - are not necessarily the ones that work best during conversation.

From the Summer 2007 issue of 'Speaking Out', page 8