Why some people suffer from a stutter

I have a stutter. Years of speech therapy as a kid did very little to solve the problem. The only thing that helped somewhat was a device called the "Speakeasy". It looked similar to a hearing aid, and essentially played back what I said to me. The insight was that when people who stutter speak along with someone, they tend to stutter less. I've also noticed I don't stutter at all when singing along to a song. It kind of ties in with this study; your brain knows exactly what speech to form, so the "weak" connections are sufficient.

Really happy about the progress being made in this field. Stuttering has been both a cause and result of my social anxiety, which people often mistake for aloofness or worse. Can't wait to try new therapies!

I had a roommate with a stutter, but never when telling a joke, talking to the dog, or singing. We are way more complicated than we understand!

At least one researcher (Joseph Jordania) has a theory that articulated speech arose in East Asia and back migrated. He hypothesizes that speech disorders like stuttering are more common in European and African populations, the last to acquire articulated speech in his model and thus having less time to winnow out bad alleles.

A rather unlikely theory[1], if only because backwards gene flow was until recently anathema within the mainstream of human evolutionary genetics, but one that is readily testable. Unfortunately the jury is still out on the prevalence of stuttering in, e.g., China. Current studies suggest that stuttering is very rare in China. But the counterargument is that social stigma keeps stutterers hidden and nobody has looked hard enough to discover them. And to his credit Jordania agrees that the existing data, while favorable to his hypothesis, is underwhelming and that true prevalence remains an open question.

[1] I like his approach more generally, though. Jordania's broader theory for the emergence of human cooperative behavior is the only one I've ever encountered that works in a classical Darwinian genetic model. All the others are implicitly or explicitly dependent on group selection, which is facially contradictory to Darwinian genetics and otherwise has yet to be shown in nature. Group selection might still be a thing, but regardless of whether Jordania's model is literally true in the specifics, Jordania successfully shows that you can find a series of eminently plausible steps that remain perfectly consonant with the selfish gene model; you don't need recourse to an unproven and seemingly contradictory extension.

My young son, now 7 (no stutter), did stutter at age 4 and had some level of anxiety. My wife and I discovered that he has an allergy to annatto, a natural seed used for orange dye & nutty flavor, that triggered the stuttering. The stuttering was likely due to slight inflammation in his brain. In this case, slice of organic American (orange) cheese caused him to stutter within 10 minutes. Then we could tell when he had goldfish crackers for snack at school (dad, they weren't purple crackers, they were orange -- said with a strong stutter). His stuttering disappeared within a couple months of removing annatto foods from his diet. What about the annatto ~triggered inflammation, we do not know (I have an idea, but it's pretty hard to test).

I am in my early 30s and I have had a stutter since childhood. It was pretty serious when I was younger, currently pretty manageable - many/most people I know don't know(or remember) that I stutter. As I get older it's become more of an internal battle. I am pretty good at hiding it.

If I am relaxed I can talk for long stretches without pauses. But occasionally I have to take a second or two before I can get a word out, this is especially disturbing during a dialogue with a person I don't know. It's even stranger when it happens in the middle of a sentence. I am sure I have left many people the impression that I don't know something extremely basic, or am mentally handicapped in some way. I usually make a thinking face and vocalize a "hmm..." if I feel a stutter coming up, it's better than staring the other person silently during my internal struggle.

I know a word is going to cause problems even before I try vocalizing it, my brain let's me know in advance, I can feel the word being broken...blocked...sharp. I often reorganize sentences to get around them. If I really need to use that specific word I may start talking about something else, while battling with the word in my head, usually I can insert it into an in-progress sentence, instead of starting a sentence with it.

I think I only stutter when the word begins with a strong letter, like k,t,p. I may also be subconsciously bending/smoothing the other letters without others/myself noticing, but getting a k,t,p - especially at the beginning of a sentence - out of my throat can be really challenging.

Collecting myself, changing my posture, looking elsewhere, coughing, etc. can ease the first vocals out. Slight coughs or throat clearings are especially good for masking the bent first letters. Too bad about coughing not being in vogue right now.

It will not happen during singing, only conversation, especially when I feel its a stressful situation - eg. even asking something trivial from the shop clerk. When I was younger there were many things I left un-bought because I couldn't vocalize them to the clerk. I don't remember myself ever stuttering on the phone - though I may misremember. Sometimes I don't remember when I last stuttered, though I might not register it as an event any more. It has not ruined any moments. I have probably organized my life to have less triggers to stutter.

Overall it's a pretty stupid thing and I would prefer not to have it.

EDIT: I only stutter in my native language, I don't stutter in the couple of other languages I know.