Probing Question: What causes stuttering?

By Grace Warren - Research Penn State In the movie "A Fish Called Wanda," he's the guy who bungles the old lady's murder. In "My Cousin Vinny," he's the inept public defender for the accused. People who stutter are so often portrayed in popular media as either incompetent or disturbed that even they find themselves wondering what's wrong with them. One of the most influential individuals in 20th-century psychology, Sigmund Freud, blamed stuttering on — you guessed it — the parents. It was thought that a stuttering child was possibly mimicking speech quirks of a caregiver or else suffering a neurosis or personality disturbance. Freud couldn't have been more wrong, explained Gordon Blood , a Penn State professor of communication sciences and disorders. "Stuttering is a neurophysiological problem, not a psychological problem, but what causes it is still a mystery." In recent years, researchers have identified a genetic component to stuttering.