It has been found in examinations of stammerers and stutterers, however, that they are usually of below normal chest expansion and that the health, while not particularly bad, is subject to a great improvement as a result of the proper treatment for stammering.
Charles Kingsley, the noted English divine and writer, and himself a stammerer many years ago, has the following to say regarding the effect of stammering on the body: "Continual depression of spirit wears out body as well as mind. The lungs never act rightly, never oxygenate the blood sufficiently. The vital energy continually directed to the organs of speech and there used up in the miserable spasm of mis-articulation cannot feed the rest of the body; and the man too often becomes thin, pale, flaccid, with contracted chest, loose ribs and bad digestion. I have seen a boy of twelve stunted, thin as a ghost and with every sign of approaching consumption. I have seen that boy a few months after being cured, upright, ruddy, stout, eating heartily and beginning to grow faster than he had ever grown in his life. I never knew a single case in which the health did not begin to improve then and there."
CHAPTER IX
DEFECTIVE SPEECH IN CHILDREN
(1) THE PRE-SPEAKING PERIOD
From the standpoint of speech development, the life of any person between the time of birth and the age of twenty-one years, may be divided into four periods as follows:
From Birth to Age 2—PRE-SPEAKING PERIOD.
Age 2 to Age 6—FORMATIVE-SETTING PERIOD
Age 6 to Age 11—SPEECH-SETTING PERIOD
Age 11 to Age 20—ADOLESCENT PERIOD
This chapter will deal only with the first period of the child's speech-development, beginning with birth and taking the child up to his second year. The speech disorders of the later periods will be taken up in the three following chapters.
THE PRE-SPEAKING PERIOD: This is the period between the time of birth and the age of 2, and takes the child up to the time of the first spoken word. This does not mean, of course, that no child speaks before the age of 2, for many children have made their first trials at speaking at as early an age as 15 months, and many begin to talk by the time they are a year and a half old. At the age of two, however, not only the precocious child but the child of slower-than-average development should be able to talk in at least brief, disjointed monosyllables.