You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Kwong here.

So today's the inauguration, which got us thinking about speech making and speech itself.

President-elect Joe Biden has spoken publicly about his childhood stutter, an estimated

1% of the world's adults stutter.

So in the US, that translates to 3 million people, and speech pathologist Naomi Rogers

is one of them.

My name is Naomi Rogers.

I am an assistant professor at the Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders

at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Stuttering is when a person repeats or prolongs, sounds, syllables, and words, causing breaks

in the flow of speech or disfluencies.

Often it begins in childhood.

While most childhood stutters disappear, some stay with a person all their life.

Naomi describes stuttering as a social phenomenon.

Stuttering tends to only occur in the context of other people.

People who stutter tend to speak really fluently when they are talking to themselves, when

they are talking to their pets, when they are singing, when they're reading in unison

with other people.

Scientists don't know exactly what causes stuttering, though research is increasingly linking it to

genetics.

In one study, two-thirds of people who stuttered had a family member who also stuttered or used

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