Young Girl’s Stammer Cured – With A Hearing Aid
For the past seven years Natalie Riley, now 11, had suffered from a stammer so severe she’d never had a free-flowing conversation with them. She’d been so embarrassed by her speech problem that even with her close friends she spoke only in single words.
“Her life was blighted by this stammer – there was no way of disguising it and it was heartbreaking,” says her mother Lindsey, 42, a school business manager she would struggle to get her first word out and sometimes her face would contort with the effort of trying to speak. She never wanted to take part in school activities – even games – and would never want to answer a question in class. She was bullied because of her stammer and started to become more self-conscious.”
Then eight months ago, Natalie had a special hearing aid fitted and, says her mother, her life has been transformed.
The SpeechEasy device works by recreating the choral effect. It looks – and is worn – like a hearing aid, and is placed behind the ear or inside the ear canal. When someone with a stammer talks using a SpeechEasy, their words are captured on microphone and replayed in their ear at a slightly higher frequency (this helps them hear it better).
The SpeechEasy replays these words within 60 milliseconds – fooling the brain into thinking the stammerer is speaking at the same time as other people, triggering the choral effect. According to manufacturers, the device has around an 80 per cent success rate. Peter Jones, a clinical physiologist at BMI The Alexandra Hospital in Manchester, who treated Natalie, says: “Some people who use the device find that after a few months, they are cured completely because using this system kicks them into a manner of speaking without stammer.”
Normally the device is considered suitable only for those aged 16 or over because until the age of 14, a stammer can be solved with speech therapy. However, Natalie’s case was so severe that it was decided she might benefit from it.
Natalie was fitted with the device in September.
