Speech Disorders

Credit the "The King's Speech" for 12 Oscar nominations, $236 million in worldwide box office ? and a lot more business for speech therapists. Across the nation, clinics specializing in speech disorders and stutterers themselves say the film about British King George VI's battle to overcome a lifelong stammer has inspired many others, often shy and reluctant to seek assistance, to reach out for professional help. At the Stuttering Foundation of America, a nonprofit organization that provides information on stuttering and referrals to therapists nationwide, donations have shot up 20% since the movie opened, officials said.

Credit the "The King's Speech" for 12 Oscar nominations, $236 million in worldwide box office ? and a lot more business for speech therapists. Across the nation, clinics specializing in speech disorders and stutterers themselves say the film about British King George VI's battle to overcome a lifelong stammer has inspired many others, often shy and reluctant to seek assistance, to reach out for professional help. At the Stuttering Foundation of America, a nonprofit organization that provides information on stuttering and referrals to therapists nationwide, donations have shot up 20% since the movie opened, officials said.

Stuttering and a serious form of snoring known as sleep apnea may be linked, and both conditions may be caused by brain damage sustained early in life, U.S. researchers said Monday. A team at UCLA found that nearly 40% of sleep apnea patients it studied also stuttered as children. Sleep apnea is a serious form of snoring in which a patient's breathing actually stops several times a night. It is linked with a high rate of heart death.

Martin Romoff used to rely on his voice to make a living as a Los Angeles tire salesman. But two decades of Parkinson's disease muffled his speech and spoiled the art of easy conversation. Even his wife, Shirley, asked him to repeat himself over and over. Then he learned about a special kind of voice training.

A Cal State Fullerton professor has been awarded more than $200,000 to compare the effectiveness of two methods of treating stuttering in children. The one-year grant of $224,273 was given by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to Glendon D. Riley, a professor emeritus of speech disorders at the Fullerton campus. The institute also has agreed to support the three-year study with additional funding through August, 1995, university officials said.

Phyllis S. Peterson's voice has betrayed her for decades. The 75-year-old Portland, Conn., resident has a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which has reduced her speech to puffs of words she can only force out slowly and quietly. For nine weeks, Khalid El-Sayed's voice has taken a vacation. The third-year University of Connecticut medical student from New Britain, Conn.

When Michael Wilmington, formerly a movie writer for The Times and now the film critic for the Chicago Tribune, was stricken with spastic dysphonia--which leaves its victim with a strangled voice--he was able to overcome the problem by working with self-proclaimed "voice builder" Gary Catona. Today, Catona's client list includes show business personalities who want to build their voices as well as ordinary people with vocal problems or traumas.

Four-year-old Ciara Neice sat on a chair next to her teacher, Gina Nimmo, holding her doll, Ashley. "Say, 'My ba-by," Nimmo told the girl. "My ba-by," Ciara answered. "Perfect!" her teacher said. Nimmo is a speech-language pathologist who works with children in the Fountain Valley School District who have communication and speech disorders. A 15-year speech and language teacher, Nimmo coordinates the district's program for special needs of infants and preschool children up to the age of 5.

Ordering dinner may not sound like much of a triumph, but it is when you stutter like Kevin Murphy. For most of his life, the 19-year-old college student had avoided public speaking and talking to strangers. The embarrassment caused by the few excruciating seconds of stammering over a syllable, word or phrase was simply too much to bear. Because of it, Murphy's parents always had ordered his meals when eating out.

American intolerance for accents that fall strangely on their ears has generated a recent surge in students hoping to sound like a U.S. network newscaster. "I think there have been more requests for accent reduction work in the last decade, last five or six years," said Roy A. Koenigsknecht, president of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Assn.

Phyllis S. Peterson's voice has betrayed her for decades. The 75-year-old Portland, Conn., resident has a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which has reduced her speech to puffs of words she can only force out slowly and quietly. For nine weeks, Khalid El-Sayed's voice has taken a vacation. The third-year University of Connecticut medical student from New Britain, Conn.

The local TV camera crew was searching for a sound bite after a Fullerton Troy girls' tennis match three years ago. They wanted to hear about the pressures of playing for a top-notch high school tennis program. Coach Donna Judd suggested they interview a freshman player, rather than her, and pointed to Clare Fermin. By the time Judd remembered Fermin had a stuttering problem, which becomes more pronounced when she becomes excited or nervous, it was too late.

Ordering dinner may not sound like much of a triumph, but it is when you stutter like Kevin Murphy. For most of his life, the 19-year-old college student had avoided public speaking and talking to strangers. The embarrassment caused by the few excruciating seconds of stammering over a syllable, word or phrase was simply too much to bear. Because of it, Murphy's parents always had ordered his meals when eating out.

Stuttering and a serious form of snoring known as sleep apnea may be linked, and both conditions may be caused by brain damage sustained early in life, U.S. researchers said Monday. A team at UCLA found that nearly 40% of sleep apnea patients it studied also stuttered as children. Sleep apnea is a serious form of snoring in which a patient's breathing actually stops several times a night. It is linked with a high rate of heart death.

Stuttering, which affects about 1% of people after childhood, is caused by an abnormal structure of the left side of the brain, German researchers reported in Saturday's edition of the British journal The Lancet. The study used magnetic resonance imaging to look at 15 stutterers and 15 people with normal speech and found the impediment results from a disconnection of speech-related areas in the cortex, a team from the University of Hamburg said.

What would be a simple speech for many was filled with landmines for Kevin Murphy, a gangly college student from Boise, Idaho. "It seems like it was yesterday that I first sat in this workshop," Murphy told a packed ballroom Friday afternoon--fighting through "seems" and "yesterday," wrestling with "sat" and stumbling over "this." For once, there were no nasty snickers or uncomfortable stares when he spoke. Only warm smiles, on his face and nearly a hundred others.

Monica Fankhauser could fill volumes with the observations and opinions she has kept to herself all her life out of fear that she'd be ridiculed or rejected if she said what was on her mind. It's not what she has to say but the way she speaks that makes her feel she's putting herself on the line every time she engages in conversation. Fankhauser is one of an estimated 2.5 million Americans who stutter.

When Colin began preschool last fall, his speech was unintelligible. When he wanted to communicate, he'd grab another child's chin and yank at his face, or pull on his clothes and talk in a loud voice, speech and language pathologist Patti Wade recalls. Wade, who works in the Beverly Hills School District, began giving Colin speech therapy. To improve his articulation, she showed him how to bite down gently on his lower lip and blow air out to make the "f" sound.

Julie Andrews said it in "The Sound of Music": When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything. Now some Pittsburgh musicians are trying to prove it is true, even for youths with a speech disorder that keeps them from singing when the songs are too fast or the words too complex. Two parents of children with the disorder apraxia rounded up musicians, including the musical director at public television's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," to produce a compact disc, "Time to Sing."

They have flown over deficits, sprinted past injuries, marched calmly through the most treacherous moments of their professional lives. But these last two months, the most courageous single act I have seen among the Lakers occurs when one is standing still. It is Ron Harper. Every time he opens his mouth.