Blockbuster biopic The King’s Speech ruled the Oscars last night, garnering awards for Best Actor, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. The film presents the tale of Britain’s King George VI (Colin Firth), a temperamental heir whose lifelong struggle with a debilitating stammer cast him as an unlikely monarch. Ultimately, it is a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) whose unorthodox methods enable the king to conquer his impediment and become the voice that inspires a nation on the verge of War World II.

Today, an estimated one percent of the population---or one in 100 people---stutters. To find out just how far speech science has come since the 1930s, we talked to Vivian Sisskin of the University of Maryland’s Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. Here's what we learned:

• In “The King’s Speech,” Firth’s character concludes that early traumatic experiences and neglect may have been the source of his stuttering. While experts are still unaware of its exact cause, Sisskin says, they have ruled out “deep-seated emotional conflict” as a trigger for stuttering. In fact, feelings of anxiety, tension, and fear of speaking are likely the result of stuttering, not its cause.

• Fifty to sixty percent of stutterers have a genetic predisposition to stuttering, suggesting that the impediment is a kind of neurophysiologic disorder that runs in families. In fact, it is relatively common for children to experience some form of stuttering, and 80 percent of them recover without any help.

• In the film, the king tries a variety of uncomfortable methods to improve his speech, including stuffing his mouth with marbles, shouting swear words, and rolling around on the carpet. While these methods rarely exist in practice today, Sisskin says that some of the film’s other linguistic exercises are indeed effective. For example, breaking sentences into smaller linguistic units, reducing time constraints, and heavy pausing and phrasing are helpful in inducing fluency in speech.

•  When treating patients who stutter, Sisskin says that there are two main goals in therapy: First, working on motor aspects of speech in order to move toward the ultimate goal of fluency; second, tackling the psychological constraints that result from stuttering. Stutterers tend to perform what she calls “mental gymnastics,” going to great lengths to avoid communication. It’s important that patients learn to stop hiding and overcome feelings of embarrassment, frustration, or incompetency.

-Kerri Pinchuk

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