Speech disorder leads to a career helping others

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Speech disorder leads to a career helping others

Posted September 27, 2010 at 10:52 am · By ASU News

Filed under General, Health, Today

BOONE—Joe Klein changed his original career plans of becoming a reporter because

of a speech disorder. It’s lucky for others that he did.

Klein stutters. An assistant professor in Appalachian State University’s

Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Klein trains future speech

pathologists to help others who have speech disorders.

“I had wanted to major in journalism, but I was terrified of using the phone and

terrified of asking questions,” Klein said. “I chose a degree in philosophy for

which I only had to read books and write papers. I let my speech disorder choose

my college major for me.”

Klein began stuttering at about age 3, an age when stuttering typically appears

in children.

He says the exact cause of stuttering is unknown. It can be related to genetics,

or be based in a physiological or neurological problem. “Speaking is such a

complicated process. It uses many parts of the brain and there are various

muscles involved in speech,” he said. “If we don’t know how people put all of

that together, we can’t really understand why it breaks down either.”

Stuttering occurs in about 1 percent of the population and usually begins

between the ages of 2 and 4. “A lot of children recover fairly quickly, but if

you get beyond that 3- and 4-year window, it’s very hard to completely recover

from stuttering,” Klein said.

Like most stutterers, Klein developed ways to hide his problem. He would change

words mid-sentence if he knew they were likely to cause a problem, or he would

avoid talking in class.

He received speech therapy as a child, but it wasn’t until his early 20s that

Klein fully understood his stuttering. Speech therapy that focused on stuttering

and his use of forced stuttering to analyze how he stuttered helped Klein

improve his fluency. “That really improved my whole life – not only my talking

but how I viewed myself,” he said.

That’s also when he decided to pursue advance degrees in speech and language

disorders.

“I wanted to be able to help other people who stuttered however I could. A lot

of speech therapists aren’t really that good working with people who stutter

because most of their work focuses on those who have language or articulation

disorders,” he said. “Everyone usually ends up with just one client who stutters

on their caseload, so they never really get very good at it. It’s important to

me to try and provide good therapy to my clients and strategies for speech

therapists to use with their clients.”

While analyzing how he stuttered helped Klein reduce his stutters, beneficial

strategies for others might include breathing smoothly and easily when speaking

or prolonging their vowel sounds.

While at Appalachian, Klein hopes to start a campus chapter of the National

Stuttering Association, a support group for people who stutter. He also wants to

research the role of support groups in improving a person’s stuttering. “There

is a lot of support for people who stutter but we don’t have any research on how

these support groups help people who stutter – is it the support alone, or is a

therapy component needed as well?” he said.

He also will continue to find ways to improve speech therapy provided to

students in the public schools. “When a therapist has 25 clients with

articulation disorders, 25 with a language disorder and one who stutters, we

need to find ways to improve the therapy provided to that one student in a class

or school system who stutters, as well as stutterers in the adult population.

“When people first come in for therapy, they often are in a job they don’t like

and probably could be doing a lot more than what they are currently doing, or

perhaps they don’t have as much of a social life as they would like to have,”

Klein said. “Part of our job is to help open up their world.”

The Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders is housed in the College

of Health Sciences. It offers the Bachelor of Science in communication disorders

and the Master of Science in speech-language pathology. Details about the degree

offerings are at http://comdis.appstate.edu/.

The department’s E. and Geneva S. ish Rite Communication

Disorders Clinic is located off Blowing Rock Road in University Hall. It

provides individual diagnostics and treatment for a variety of speech, language

and hearing disorders. More information in online at

http://cdclinic.appstate.edu/about.