Stamering And Cognate Defects Of Speech Vol - Ii

"MODES OF ENUNCIATION, ETC. in

tke of creating artificial difficulties for the student by
interrupting him, requesting him to repeat, and so
on, is certainly a sensible procedure* Usually the
student does not encounter such difficulties till the
course of training is complete, and with these diffi-
culties he is wont to encounter the customary relapse*
•— Intercourse with strangers should certainly occur
during* rather than after, the course of speech-train-
ing. "Stranger-practice** is undoubtedly a valuable
feature in any curriculum*

The usual generalizations can be applied to most
of the verbal exercises, They probably intensify the
pupil's acoustic imagery to some extent while he is
practising them for several hours a day, Further,
the pupil's confidence in the exercises temporarily
absolves Hm from fear, bewilderment, and inhibitive
auto-suggestion.

We come now to the consideration of special modes
of utterance intended to mitigate or obviate fttammer-

ing^ and to the exercises on which these modes of
utterance are practised.

We shall consider first the expedient of omitting
or reducing initial consonants. More than a hun-
dred years ago Erasmus Darwin observed1 that
stammering generally took the form of a *f broken
association" between the initial consonant and the
1 "&x>nomiii; or the LAW* of Organic Lift*/1 Loadtm* iloo.