40 Fun Facts About Speech Therapy

Stephen Hawking ran his speech-generating device in later life by twitching which part of his body?

His cheek took over in 2005, once he had lost the use of the hand that used to press a switch. Each small movement picked words on a screen at a rate of about one a minute.

Which Looney Tunes character, long voiced by Mel Blanc, closes cartoons with a stuttered farewell?

Porky Pig got his stutter from his first voice actor, Joe Dougherty, who really did stutter. Recording sessions ran so long that the studio replaced him with Mel Blanc in 1937.

Which British king turned to speech therapist Lionel Logue for help with a severe stammer?

George VI engaged Logue in 1926, while still Duke of York, after a speech at Wembley became an ordeal for him and his listeners. Their work together is the story of the film The King's Speech.

American Sign Language is most closely related to the sign language of which European country?

France is the link: Laurent Clerc, who taught in the sign language of Paris, co-founded the first American school for the deaf in 1817. British signers and ASL users cannot understand each other.

Which horseshoe-shaped bone is the only one in the human body not connected to any other?

Hyoid is the name of the floating bone, held between the chin and the thyroid cartilage by muscles and ligaments alone. It rises and moves forward with every swallow.

Which US president worked to overcome a childhood stutter by memorising lines of Yeats and Emerson?

Joe Biden learned verses by the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson by heart as a way of training himself out of the stutter.

Which Victorian author is said to have based the Dodo in his best-known book on his own stammer?

Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson, and legend has him introducing himself as Do-do-Dodgson. The Dodo is a caricature of the author, though the link to his stammer is unproven.

Which British singer credits rapping along to an Eminem album as a boy with easing his stutter?

Ed Sheeran says that learning the words of The Marshall Mathers LP helped him stammer less. He has named Eminem among his biggest musical influences, beside the Beatles.

Foreign accent syndrome, which makes a speaker suddenly sound non-native, most often follows which event?

A stroke is the usual trigger, though head injuries account for some cases. The condition is so rare and so striking that new cases often draw heavy media coverage.

Which American actor with a famously deep voice barely spoke for years as a boy because of a stutter?

James Earl Jones stayed almost silent until high school, where a teacher who found he had a gift for poetry helped him speak again. He went on to voice Darth Vader and Mufasa.

Which action star retired from acting in 2022 after his family announced a diagnosis of aphasia?

Bruce Willis stepped away in March 2022 because aphasia, which follows damage to the brain's language areas, made speaking and understanding hard. A year later he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia.

Which fleshy projection at the back of the throat takes its name from the Latin for 'little grape'?

Uvula is the diminutive of uva, the Latin word for a grape. It hangs from the back edge of the soft palate, and a split one is counted as a slight form of cleft.

Which spiral chamber of the inner ear, named after the Latin for snail shell, is the organ of hearing?

Cochlea is a nod to the coil, which makes two and three-quarter turns in humans. Egg-laying mammals such as the platypus are the notable exception: theirs is not coiled at all.

Who taught deaf pupils in Boston using Visible Speech, phonetic symbols devised by his own father?

Alexander Graham Bell took the Boston post that his father had turned down, training teachers of the deaf to use the symbols. One admirer rated them a greater invention than the son's telephone.

Which play, later the musical My Fair Lady, has a phonetics professor retrain a flower girl's speech?

Pygmalion made Henry Higgins the stage's best-known speech coach. Its author, Bernard Shaw, said he drew the character from several real British professors of phonetics.

Which hormone makes the larynx grow at puberty, deepening the typical male voice by about an octave?

Testosterone makes the voice box grow in both sexes, but far more in boys, and the vocal folds inside it get longer and thicker. Voices often crack for a while before settling.

Which dome-shaped muscle between the chest and abdomen does most of the work of breathing?

The diaphragm is the most important muscle of breathing: when it contracts, the chest cavity enlarges and air is drawn into the lungs. Its fibres meet in a tendon at the crest of the dome.

Which stage of infant speech, usually under way by six months, features strings such as 'bababa'?

Babbling in repeated consonant and vowel pairs is called canonical babbling. Babies raised with a sign language babble too, with their hands.

Which leaf-shaped flap folds over the windpipe during swallowing to keep food out of the lungs?

The epiglottis points upward during breathing so that air can pass, then bends backwards over the windpipe with each swallow. Food is steered down the oesophagus, which lies behind it.

Which ancient Athenian orator is said to have cured a stammer by practising with pebbles in his mouth?

Demosthenes also recited verses while running or out of breath, Plutarch wrote. The training paid off: Cicero later praised him as the perfect orator, who lacked nothing.

Which British actress first spoke fluently, despite a stutter, when a teacher put her in class plays?

Emily Blunt says that using voices unlike her own let her disconnect from herself and speak fluently. She has worked with the American Institute for Stuttering since 2006.

Which US professional body began in 1925 as the American Academy of Speech Correction?

ASHA, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, awards the Certificate of Clinical Competence: the CCC that certified pathologists and audiologists write after their names.

Which level of degree must a speech-language pathologist hold to practise in the United States?

A master's from an accredited programme is the entry ticket. Graduates then sit a national exam and spend a supervised clinical fellowship year working under a provisional licence.

In which month of the year do US speech-language pathologists mark National Speech-Language-Hearing Month?

May is the month of the campaign, which raises public awareness of communication disorders and of the life-altering treatment that pathologists and audiologists provide.

Which frontal-lobe speech region is named after the surgeon who found it damaged in two patients?

Broca's area usually lies on the left side of the brain. Damage tends to leave telegraphic speech, in which the content words survive but the grammar that joins them drops out.

Which swallowing disorder, treated by speech therapists, has a Greek name meaning disordered eating?

Dysphagia joins dys, bad or disordered, to phag, eat. Warning signs include coughing or choking at meals, a gurgly voice after swallowing and repeated bouts of pneumonia.

Which term names the smallest unit of sound that separates one word from another, as in 'pat' and 'bat'?

A phoneme can cover several real sounds. The p of 'pit' carries a burst of air that the p of 'spit' lacks, yet English speakers hear the two as one and the same.

Which term describes repeating back another person's words, common in children first learning to talk?

Echolalia cannot be told apart from ordinary imitation until about the age of three, when self-control develops. Repeating one's own words instead is called palilalia.

Lee Silverman Voice Treatment, or LSVT LOUD, was designed for people with which condition?

Parkinson's disease often leaves speech soft, so the four-week course drills patients to think loud in order to speak loud. It carries the name of one of its first patients.

Which anxiety disorder, diagnosed in Greta Thunberg, can leave a child talkative at home but silent at school?

Selective mutism leaves people fully able to speak and understand, yet unable to talk in certain settings. Thunberg has said that it means she only speaks when necessary.

Ankyloglossia, in which a short frenulum limits movement in the mouth, is better known by which name?

Tongue-tie is present from birth and can make breastfeeding hard. Its effect on talking is disputed: recent reviews found no difference in speech sounds between children who had release surgery and those who did not.

The 1939 Monster Study, a stuttering experiment on orphans, was run through which US state's university?

Iowa later paid former subjects $925,000 after a lawsuit over lifelong psychological scars. Wendell Johnson, who ran the study, had devoted his career to finding the cause of stuttering.

Speech therapists use which name for the sound pattern in Elmer Fudd's 'wabbit', where r and l turn into w?

Gliding is one of the last such patterns that children outgrow, often not until six or seven. The cartoon studio gave the same trait to Tweety, and wrote Elmer lines packed with the two sounds.

Which motor speech disorder, caused by weak or uncoordinated muscles, typically makes speech sound slurred?

Dysarthria follows injury to the nervous system, which leaves the muscles of speech weak, paralysed or badly coordinated. Structural problems such as a cleft palate do not count.

Which cranial nerve, the tenth, controls the muscles of the larynx through its recurrent laryngeal branch?

The vagus nerve takes a long detour on the left side of the body: its recurrent branch hooks around the arch of the aorta in the chest before climbing back up the neck to the voice box.

Which motor disorder, called CAS in children, affects the brain's planning of speech movements?

Apraxia means the brain knows what it wants to say but cannot plan and sequence the movements to say it. No weakness or paralysis of the jaw or lips is involved.

Which voice disorder, often eased with Botox injections, makes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s voice quaver?

Spasmodic dysphonia sends the muscles that produce the voice into spasm. Kennedy developed it in his forties; the injections work by weakening the vocal folds so they cannot seize up.

Jean Berko Gleason's 1958 test of how children learn plurals is named after which imaginary creature she drew?

A wug was a word no child had heard before, so answering 'wugs' for two of them showed that even young children apply the plural rule instead of memorising each word.

Which fluency disorder, sometimes confused with stuttering, is marked by a rapid and erratic rate of speech?

Cluttering runs the opposite way to a stutter: speakers start out clear, then speed up and become harder to follow, whereas people who stutter grow more fluent as a sentence goes on.

Which term, from Greek words for 'old' and 'hearing', names the gradual hearing loss that comes with ageing?

Presbycusis is the most common cause of hearing loss: about one person in three aged 65 to 74 has hearing loss, and nearly half of those over 75. It is irreversible and affects both ears alike.