Say, "Look Mom, I don't stutter anymore!" Now say it again, dragging out each syllable until the phrase lasts 15 seconds. That's how Joe Kalinowski sounded 20 years ago, when he came home from stuttering therapy. Most experts now believe that stuttering is a neurological disorder. But back then, speech therapists believed it was a psychological problem, brought on by perfectionist parents or childhood trauma. To "cure" his stutter, Kalinowski was taught to slow his speech to one syllable per second, but the only person impressed by this was his mother. Everyone else assumed Joe was demented.
Photograph by Gerald Slota
Kalinowski has since become a professor of communication sciences and disorders at East Carolina University in North Carolina, where he has come up with better ways to alleviate stuttering. By playing stutterers' voices back to them at an altered frequency, or by simply playing white noise over headphones as ...
