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personality of the stammerer and the depth to which the habit
has grown.
There are 5 boy stammerers to every girl, but other speech
defects are divided more fairly among the sexes. Stammering
is by far the most prevalent of all speech defects. The next more
usual is that known as I alling or baby talk. This is found generally
amongst only children, or youngest members of a grown-up family
who continue to talk at the age of 6 or 8 as they did at 3 years old.
This form of bad articulation, which has no organic defect sometimes
prevails to an older age and is commonly met with amongst older
children and adults of a low mental status. It can be cured byre-education
of the speech by mouth, lip and tongue exercises, and
mimicry. A young child of average intelligence will soon learn
to speak well while with an older person the cure may take longer.
A lisp is sometimes due to faulty dentition and more often to a
thick and inflexible tongue. Word-deafness and blindness are
forms of speech and hearing defects whnch are not so common
although quite frequently a case of inability to speak clearly which
appears at first sight to be lack of intelligence is found to be caused
by deafness.
The most difficult form of speech-defect is that known as
cleft-palate speech. The patient is born with a cleft palate which
may be operated on in various ways according to the position of
the cleft. But the operation cannot be performed until the child
is 2 or 3 years old so that he learns to speak badly. After the operation
it is necessary to teach the child to breath through the mouth
and nose, to exercise the uvula and soft palate which has become
stiff through the operation, and to re-educate the speech. The
child finds the exercises hard work, and unfortunately soon tires
of the practice and very often does not realise the necessity for the
cure. However, modern surgery has discovered better ways of
mending the broken mouth than those used in the past, and the
job of learning to speak well afterwards will be made correspondingly
easier for the children.
E. P.. B. CLARK,
Speech Training Therapist.
Report on Speech Training Classes.
Classes for stammering children were held twice a week,
on Mondays and Thursdays from January to December. In
January, 1935, 31 children were attending these classes and during
the year:—