Stuttering is the inability to speak fluently both when you want to and when faced with the demands of the environment, such as when someone asks you a question. Being able to express oneself fluently and easily requires starting different mental functions such as purely linguistic (think about what I am going to say), motor type (control the muscles that participate in oral production), emotional (such as being able to manage stress when I have to speak, as in an exam for example) and as suggested by Vahid Nejati and his collaborators at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, it also depends on the care as a supervisor of the whole process. In fact, more difficulties seem to have been found in selective, alternating, and divided attention in children with stuttering problems. So, in an attempt to help these little ones, Nejati conducted an experiment in which he intended to test the effects of attention training on these children.
A total of 30 participants with developmental stuttering were randomized into two groups, one experimental group that performed the NEJATI care program and another control group that remained on hold. All of them were evaluated with different tests of executive functions and stuttering severity both before and after training.
The results showed that attention training, as a non-linguistic method of rehabilitation of language disorders, produced significant improvements in executive functions and also reduced the severity of stuttering in children.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain.
