Why do people who stutter, don’t stutter when singing?
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When I was a teen, my first job was at a snackbar in a water park. I worked with a guy with a really bad stutter, but when it came time to make an announcement over the PA for a pizza order being ready or whatever, this guy sounded like he should be a radio host, perfect delivery and no hint of stuttering. We were never quite sure why he was able to do that with no issues, but couldn’t get through a sentence without stuttering in normal conversation.
Different parts of the brain are active when doing each of those tasks.
When you’re speaking, your brain is procedurally trying to conceptualize what you want to say, grabbing the words from memory required to say it, applying meaning to those words, anticipating what words, grammar, and tone should come next, as well as sending that information to the part of your brain that controls your speech, and then your mouth has to physically articulate the words you’re thinking. Often times you taking in other stimuli too, like maintaining eye contact, reading facial queues, being aware of your surroundings etc.
Quite often in people who stutter, the brain does this too fast. It charges ahead, but the actual output is too slow. This causes the “hitching” you often see in stutterers. Your brain realizes it’s fucked up, and is trying to recover a pattern of speech it’s already raced well ahead of to finish this thought. This makes the brain panic, and all the effort is suddenly taken away from forming the sentence, to then trying to recover the sentence, to just *trying to get a word out.*
Compare this with singing. You’re not procedurally coming up with speech, you’re recalling it. Memory is very good at storing patterns. And music is just one big pattern. So your brain isn’t parsing words into the “things to say” buffer too quickly for you to recite, it’s just parsing in this pattern. And you relay this pattern, which in music’s case *has words in it* so it seems similar to speech, but it could quite easily be just a tune. Ever sing along to music in the car, but you haven’t fully learned the lyrics of that song yet? That’s a great example of how the brain is good at storing the pattern, but the words and the instrumental are basically interchangeable parts of this pattern. Obviously we apply higher meaning to lyrics as we use words for other things, but your brain is just trying to match the pattern, and release serotonin when you recite the pattern correctly.
Musicologist here. There is a lot we don’t know about this, but there are many instances where song is significantly different than other language production for some reason. For example that we are much better at memorizing lyrics than other texts (even poems)
A lot of it comes down to how music activates many areas of the brain at once; memory, motor, language, etc. That might also be the case with why it helps with stuttering because two important factors of stuttering is interference between different parts of the brain and lack of coordination between the speech motor and planning regions of the brain.
more eli5 answer:
they have problem quickly putting words together to form the sentence. If they know exactly what they want to say and how they want to say it, they don’t stutter (at least those who I have met)
Basically, the left side of your brain is the part that deals with the use of language. The right side deals with artistic ability and decisions.
When a chronic stutterer sings, they’re using the right side of the brain, which means the part of the brain that has trouble processing words is being bypassed entirely.
It’s really cool, and it’s a real good starting point to look into more complex and odd brain tomfoolery. I recommend looking up “you are two CGP Gray” on YouTube. Real interesting.
[Everybody’s sayin’ that the Scatman stutters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8)
[But doesn’t ever stutter when he sings ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8)
[But what you don’t know, I’m gonna tell you right now ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8)
[That the stutter and the scat is the same thing ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8)
[Yo, I’m the Scatman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy8kmNEo1i8)
It’s actually really interesting! Singing uses a different part of the brain than talking. There’s also a rare condition where a person can develop an accent when they talk after a TBI but are completely accent free when singing
One theory is that stuttering is a rate and rhythm disorder. With a song, the rate and rhythm are already determined. The person does not have to spontaneously come up with it. Most stutterers can read out loud better than they can spontaneously speak.
Why do people, add commas in the middle of sentences?
As someone who stutters occasionally, I also don’t get this
I mean ok, usually I stutter when I’m talking faster than I can think, or if I’m thinking way too much, but usually when I sing, the words just come out of my mouth
Additionally, to add on to u/perplex1’s post, if my stuttering is bad enough to inhibit my speech (rare, but it happens), I kinda just switch from thinking of the concepts to imagining hearing this announcer-type voice that is smooth as FUCK
also sometimes I mispronounce something and then trip through the whole sentance
also also sometimes I accidentally flip the first letter of two words, for example, “Tustin Jimberlake”
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