Speech Therapy
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40 free Speech Therapy trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Speech-language pathologists work on far more than lisps. On any given day an SLP might coach a toddler toward first words, help an adult relearn language after a brain injury, retrain a teacher's strained voice or check whether a patient can swallow safely. Few professions draw on so much anatomy, linguistics, neurology and plain patience at once. This quiz covers that whole territory. Expect questions on the structures that make a voice, the sounds of English and how children pick them up, the disorders clinicians treat and the terms they use for them, and the field's landmark studies and credentials. Along the way you will meet a king, a president, a cartoon character and several film stars who stuttered. The early questions are fair game for anyone; the later ones are pitched at SLPs, graduate students and clinical fellows who want to test what stuck from their coursework. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the set works as a staff-room icebreaker, a class warm-up or a few minutes of friendly revision.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Stephen Hawking ran his speech-generating device in later life by twitching which part of his body?
His cheek
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.
Q 02Which Looney Tunes character, long voiced by Mel Blanc, closes cartoons with a stuttered farewell?
Porky Pig
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.
Q 03Which British king turned to speech therapist Lionel Logue for help with a severe stammer?
George VI
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.
Q 04American Sign Language is most closely related to the sign language of which European country?
France
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.
Q 05Which horseshoe-shaped bone is the only one in the human body not connected to any other?
Hyoid
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.
Q 06Which US president worked to overcome a childhood stutter by memorising lines of Yeats and Emerson?
Joe Biden
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.
Q 07Which Victorian author is said to have based the Dodo in his best-known book on his own stammer?
Lewis Carroll
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.
Q 08Which British singer credits rapping along to an Eminem album as a boy with easing his stutter?
Ed Sheeran
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.
Q 09Foreign accent syndrome, which makes a speaker suddenly sound non-native, most often follows which event?
A stroke
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.
Q 10Which American actor with a famously deep voice barely spoke for years as a boy because of a stutter?
James Earl Jones
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.
Q 11Which action star retired from acting in 2022 after his family announced a diagnosis of aphasia?
Bruce Willis
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.
Q 12Which fleshy projection at the back of the throat takes its name from the Latin for 'little grape'?
Uvula
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.
Q 13Which spiral chamber of the inner ear, named after the Latin for snail shell, is the organ of hearing?
Cochlea
Q 21Which British actress first spoke fluently, despite a stutter, when a teacher put her in class plays?
Emily Blunt
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.
Q 22Which US professional body began in 1925 as the American Academy of Speech Correction?
ASHA
ASHA, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, awards the Certificate of Clinical Competence: the CCC that certified pathologists and audiologists write after their names.
Q 23Which level of degree must a speech-language pathologist hold to practise in the United States?
A master's
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.
Q 14Who taught deaf pupils in Boston using Visible Speech, phonetic symbols devised by his own father?
Alexander Graham Bell
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.
Q 15Which play, later the musical My Fair Lady, has a phonetics professor retrain a flower girl's speech?
Pygmalion
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.
Q 16Which hormone makes the larynx grow at puberty, deepening the typical male voice by about an octave?
Testosterone
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.
Q 17Which dome-shaped muscle between the chest and abdomen does most of the work of breathing?
Diaphragm
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.
Q 18Which stage of infant speech, usually under way by six months, features strings such as 'bababa'?
Babbling
Babbling in repeated consonant and vowel pairs is called canonical babbling. Babies raised with a sign language babble too, with their hands.
Q 19Which leaf-shaped flap folds over the windpipe during swallowing to keep food out of the lungs?
Epiglottis
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.
Q 20Which ancient Athenian orator is said to have cured a stammer by practising with pebbles in his mouth?
Demosthenes
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.
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.
Q 24In which month of the year do US speech-language pathologists mark National Speech-Language-Hearing Month?
May
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.
Q 25Which frontal-lobe speech region is named after the surgeon who found it damaged in two patients?
Broca's area
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.
Q 26Which swallowing disorder, treated by speech therapists, has a Greek name meaning disordered eating?
Dysphagia
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.
Q 27Which term names the smallest unit of sound that separates one word from another, as in 'pat' and 'bat'?
Phoneme
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.
Q 28Which term describes repeating back another person's words, common in children first learning to talk?
Echolalia
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.
Q 29Lee Silverman Voice Treatment, or LSVT LOUD, was designed for people with which condition?
Parkinson's disease
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.
Q 30Which anxiety disorder, diagnosed in Greta Thunberg, can leave a child talkative at home but silent at school?
Selective mutism
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.