Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Repeated reading makes us more fluent

The more often we read a word or sentence, the more fluent we get. I am not sure exactly why, possibly because the signals to say the word are getting more prominence in the brain and cannot be locked by other signals??

I have seen dramatic effect with one very severe stutterer. He was unable to say the sentence without severe blocks and other symptoms. As this event happened during a therapy, we, the other patients, forced him to say it over and over again. And more and more he became fluent, and at the end he could say it without stuttering and tension...

This fluency-inducing method is different to the fluency-inducing singing, talking in rhythum, with a foreign accent, chorus reading and so on. For such tasks, the speaker only speaks the word/sentence once.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I stuttered a lot while in high school. My friend and I did "Who's on First" for a talent show -- two nights. We practiced every day for the three months before. Didn't stutter once during the show in front of hundreds.