Broca's Area (Speech Impediment)

Broca’s area—a region in the left frontal lobe that helps you produce speech. It helps turn thoughts and comprehension into spoken words, and when it is disrupted, speaking can become slow, effortful, or broken.

Would I ever feel comfortable speaking? My ESL teacher placed her wrinkly hands on top of mine. I tilted my head down, hiding my tears. I had been stuck on the same word for nearly ten minutes. I tried again. My mother tongue clashed with my new language: English.

Every word I spat out seemed foreign and unnatural. My mouth had barricaded my words, like immigrants struggling to leave East Asia. Mrs. Min smiled at me, her reassuring smile tinged with worry. Her crescent shaped eyes always had a story behind them, yearning to be told to her small class of five. However, this time, I didn’t quite enjoy the story. 

“Looks like you’re going to have to stay for another year here, Mia.”

 So, I was placed in ESL for another year. And another year after that. I became indifferent to the regularity of my teacher pulling me out of class to see Mrs. Min, much like my resignation about my stutter. I felt defeated. It was hard to master the language, add to my vocabulary, and overcome the stutter all at once. The combination felt exhausting. It trailed behind me wherever I went—the community pool, my mom’s salon during Take-Your-Kid-to-Work-Day, and the busted fruit mart at the corner of our neighborhood. 

Usually, children would be scared of rollercoasters, monsters under their bed, or daddy long-leg spiders. For me, speaking became my biggest fear. Being twelve, I came up with a temporary solution to what I had thought would be a permanent problem. Instead of using my voice, I started writing to express myself. My mom, as an owner of her business, had old tax papers scattered around the house. I asked her not to throw them out; the blank back pages were invitations for me to write. My scratch-paper stories became beautiful visions of my life and emotions, and ultimately became my first published book.

What I didn’t realize back then, is that speaking is not only one skill. I wish it was. But, speaking is actually a quick sequence of skills that have to happen at once. Your brain has to select the right word, construct it into a sentence, and then plan the sounds. It also has to coordinate your lips, tongue, jaw, and breathing. Broca’s area is actually part of a larger network of speech. This network is responsible for assisting in transforming your thought into an articulatory plan. Research indicates Broca’s area is actually involved in speech production in linking language with motor planning (Flinker et al., 2015). Sometimes, your thought gets stuck, although your understanding of it is crystal clear. Have you ever felt your brain is working faster than your lips? It’s kind of like your body is lagging behind your own thoughts.

The strain of learning English likely made this strain stronger because the brain was working on multiple tasks at once. I was not simply speaking, I was working to translate my words, searching my memory bank for the right words, and struggling to avoid embarrassment in front of others. All of these activities take concentration and working memory! The strain of these activities may make the timing of your speech more vulnerable. In studies of stuttering, researchers often point to brain activity and connectivity in the brain that helps with the production of speech. This helps explain why stuttering is not the result of lacking intelligence or trying hard enough. It’s about your coordination and timing. My body was working hard in overtime when I struggled with the word for ten minutes.

Stress only makes it more difficult :( Stress alters the nervous system’s management of muscle tension and timing. As you feel that you are being watched, or listened to, your body may tense up, and your respiration may become shallow and your speech more labored. The more you labor, the more inflexible your speech may become. It is…as if the fear of stuttering makes you more likely to stutter. Have you ever dreaded something so badly that your body actually managed to cause the problem you wanted to avoid?

It’s in this sense that writing became more than just an escape. It became an escape that gave my speech system a rest but also gave me power over my own words. It gave me the power to construct sentences and choose words without interruption. It gave me the power to allow my thoughts to be translated into words, without having to go through the pressure of having to say them aloud. It’s in this sense that the act of writing is not an abandonment of voice, but voice finding an alternative route to self-expression until I was ready to face the world of speech with confidence.