The NCS Model Of
Stuttering
 When
individuals are under stress they get tense. The tension can be measured.
Electrodes can be attached to the muscles and sent to an appropriate measuring
instrument. When this has been done in the past, it has been observed that some
people get more tense than others and that everyone seems to have a spot on the
body where they focus their tension. This spot is called the Target Area. People
are born with it, and sometimes it is inherited.
The five most common Target Areas for people are the muscles of the shoulders,
the abdominal wall, the face, the hands, and the lower back. Most people, under
conditions of stress, tend to focus tension at one of these five areas. But in
addition to these, there are a group of other Targets, affecting small
percentages of people.
One of these, affecting two and a half percent of the people in the world,
are the muscles in and around the vocal cords.
It is our contention, derived from the results of many studies, that all people
who stutter come from this two and a half percent subpopulation. In other words,
people who stutter are born with a Target Area at their vocal cords; people who
stutter are born with the tendency to get "all choked up" when under conditions
of stress.
And when they are young, usually between two and eight, and under some condition
of stress (like having a new baby brother born, starting school, parents getting
a divorce, moving to a new neighborhood, having to rush to get a word in
edgewise, learning to speak their language at the rates with which they hear
their parents speaking that language) - whatever the stress is, is not too
important, but what is important is that on a particular day there be enough
stress present, focusing enough tension at the cords, that as they begin to
speak their vocal cords lock.
When this happens they can't speak and so they begin to struggle to release the
lock. The struggle becomes a habit and it's what the world sees and hears and
calls stuttering. So stuttering is learned struggle behavior, learned in
childhood to release a child from an inborn, often inherited, tendency to lock
their cords when under conditions of stress.
As they get older the original stresses disappear. They are replaced with new
stresses. There are three particular stresses that people who stutter suffer
from: feared sounds, feared words, and feared speaking situations - and now, in
response to these stresses, they lock their vocal cords and fire off their
stutter reflex. Or, instead of letting that happen, they learn to substitute
easy-to-say words for difficult ones, or learn to use starters to get their
vocal cords vibrating, or remain silent, or learn simply to avoid difficult
speaking situations altogether.
Often they become so good at these avoidance behaviors that many people do not
know they have a problem. They become "closet stutterers." But most of the time
they display a combination of both avoidance and struggle.
The key to dealing with the problem is not to treat the stuttering or the
avoidances (that's conventional speech therapy) but instead to treat the trigger
for the stuttering - the locking of the vocal cords. If this can be
accomplished, speech invariably emerges fluent. The Fluency Enhancer Program is
designed to teach its students, step-by-step, precisely how to do just this.
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