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From: Peter Ramig
Date: 10/3/03
Time: 8:59:00 AM
Remote Name: 134.29.3.133
Experiencing less or no stuttering when acting is a common phenomenon associated with stuttering. A number of us published articles on ameliorative effects that occur in several fluency enhancing conditions such as singing, talking to very young children, choral effeccts,etc. What we learned from these studies tells us fluency is often generated when we change the way we typically speak. In all of the fluency enhancing conditions that I am aware, speech is produced differently to create the perception of the condition, such as in singing, changing pitch significantly, speaking in a monotone, etc. In the case of acting, I suspect the differnce in the voice that is created by projecting, speaking louder, imitating an accent, etc, may be at least part of the reason fluency is created, as we suspect in the other fluency enhancing conditions mentioned above. So, speculatively at least, whatever causes stuttering in our normal speech, appears to be lessened or eliminated when we substantially change the way speech is produced as we do when we sing, speak in a monotone, high or low pitch, to young children, to a metronome, etc. etc.. Perhaps neural pathways are also modified or perhaps distraction plays a role (although this later is less likely in my view).