On Stuttering

Last night, while watching the excellent film, The King’s Speech, I remembered that many years ago I stumbled upon a means of making anyone stutter and thus pointing to one possible cause.  In the film, Albert, Duke of York and 2nd in-line to become King of England, seeks help for his severe stuttering from Lionel Logue, a speech therapist,. In one scene, ‘Bertie’ reads the monologue “To be, or not to be …” perfectly whilst his hearing is blocked with headphones emitting classical music {‘pink noise’ would have been a better choice]. So. What’s going on here?
By the 1960’s most tape recorders used 3 heads in the recording process: an Erase head, a Record head, and finally, a Play head with the tape moving so as to be first erased then recorded. This results in a delay between the time a sound is recorded and when it played back to a listener. In tapes running at a speed of 15 inches/second this would result in a delay of around 100 milliseconds if the heads were separated by 1½ inches.  Speech normally reaches a speaker’s ear in less than a millisecond. If one records their voice while listening to the recording on headphones, they immediately start elongating their words to try to synchronize their speaking with what they hear in the headphones. This soon lapses into uncontrollable stammering. So. A delay in what a speaker hears when s/he speaks can certainly cause stammering. And. When blocking the path of what s/he hears when speaking allows fluent speech, then this implies a hearing delay exists somewhere in the middle or inner ear, or in the brain itself. Finding where the delay occurs may allow finding means to reduce or eliminate the delay. Otherwise, practicing physical techniques for ignoring the delays such as Logue used provides some relief. However. If they had provided King George VI with headphones issuing noise [or possibly ear plugs], he would have produced perfect radio speeches.