DO STUTTERERS TALK TOO FAST?
Stutterers will tell you that they talk too fast, and this results in stuttering. We feel like our minds can produce speech “a mile a minute,” and that our speech-production muscles can’t keep up, and we stumble and fall over our words. Several studies by Joy Armson and Joseph Kalinowski found that auditory feedback (DAF and FAF) enabled stutterers not only to talk fluently, but to talk extremely fast (averaging 6.5 words per second), while reading out loud. Martin Schwartz suggests that a fast start on a sentence increases vocal fold tension before the first word of a phrase, which then leads to stuttering. He believes, however, that speaking fast on the rest of the sentence has much less effect on stuttering than starting the first word fast. Studies of stutterers’ fluent speech have found that our fluent speech is slower than nonstutterers. Early studies measured overall speaking rate of fluent speech (not counting disfluencies), and found that stutterers talk slower. Many other stu
