repeating words and speech therapy

Word-Final Disfluencies: How Can I Help My Child?

Word-final disfluencies are often classified as forms of stuttering that occur at the ends of words or sentences. However, the treatments for this disfluency type are often more typical of therapies used for other disfluencies and not necessarily stuttering. Image source: busybeespeech.blogspot.com

Uniqueness is a beautiful thing – unless that is it comes to struggling to find a diagnosis and treatment plan for an uncommon speech disorder. Then unique can translate to undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, either one of which can be frustrating and challenging for families. If you’re a parent of a child with word-final disfluency, chances are that at least one time you’ve been told that your child’s speech pattern is unique, but not necessarily something to worry about or for which to seek therapy. Unique can be beautiful, but if you’ve got that feeling in your parental gut about that not-so-normal-stuttering speech pattern, there are steps you can take to help your child.

What Are Word-Final Disfluencies?

Also known as an atypical disfluencies, word-final disfluencies are speech disorders that seems related to stuttering. The last syllable or sound of a word is repeated. Your child’s speech pattern might be something like this:

“I want the ball-all-all-all.”

“Here is my backpack-ack-ack-ack.”

“I like red-ed-ed-ed apples the best-est-est.”

The disfluency is similar to stuttering , only with the broken sounds and syllables coming at the ends of words instead of the typical beginning. Like diagnosed cases of stuttering, true word-final-disfluencies do not just disappear overnight or within a few days. Children can struggle with them for months or years. I know firsthand as a parent how confusing this speech disorder can be, as a pediatrician discounted it as a phase, but a speech pathologist acknowledged it as an actual disorder based on specific considerations – first and foremost the longevity of the word-final disfluencies, and secondly because of the consistency of it, no matter the social situation.

Why Does My Child Have Word-Final Disfluency?

Because this speech disorder is considered atypical , there are not yet prevailing and consistent diagnoses made about the causes or the treatments. It is most often associated with other disorders as an overlapping symptom, which can make diagnosing even more challenging. Several studies do show that there appears to be a connection between word-final-disfluency and other conditions such as ADHD, Autism, and Tourette’s syndrome.

How Can I Help My Child With Word-Final Disfluency?

If you see these atypical stuttering patterns in your child’s speech and wonder if it is more than just a passing phase, there are several steps you can take to help your child develop stronger communication skills, and perhaps address larger issues.

Just as with typical stuttering, children can quickly lose confidence if they are criticized for their speech patterns. Remember to use gentle encouragement and not constant corrections. Image source: lifespantherapies.com

• Visit with your child’s pediatrician . A baseline health exam is important to rule out or diagnose other health or behavior conditions.
• Learn as much as you can about typical speech development . If your child is on the Autism spectrum there are several speech disorders that can be a part of a dual diagnosis, so typical might have a different meaning for your child.
• Take patient turns in conversations . This is always a good rule of thumb when it comes to helping children develop communication skills, but for kids with word-final-disfluencies it is even more important. Give your child the time to complete sounds and sentences without feeling rushed. Sometimes those stuttering sounds at the end are “fillers” that give kids time to formulate the next word they want to use.
• Creating awareness without criticism – sometimes done by recording your child’s speaking and helping them mark the times where the word ends are repeated
• Developing relaxation techniques for calmer breathing and speaking
• Helping to develop healthy speech pacing where your child finds a more effective rhythm for speaking

Probably two of the most important things parents can do when they suspect their children have speech disorders are to have persistence and patience. Persistence when it comes to searching for and finding the right resources, and patience for helping their children develop into the beautiful and unique beings that they are.

Delaney Collins, CCC-SLP

Speech-language therapy.

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Understanding aphasia and its causes

• Speech-Language

"It's on the tip of my tongue" is a phrase people say time and time again. Sometimes it's hard to find that word you're looking for — whether it's someone's name, an everyday object, a favorite restaurant menu item, your address or something else. But for people with a disorder called aphasia, it's as if their brain's word cabinet has fallen over and mixed their words around, resulting in varying levels and forms of impairment with language comprehension and expression.

Causes of aphasia

A stroke and its subsequent brain damage is the most common cause of aphasia. A stroke results from the bursting or blockage of blood vessels supplying the brain. This reduces blood flow to the brain, depriving the brain of essential nutrients and oxygen needed to support brain cell life. When a stroke occurs , the brain's language centers can be affected if they don't receive essential components like blood and oxygen.

Aphasia also can develop due to a brain tumor, infection or degenerative disease. There always is an underlying cause of aphasia, which determines the severity of the person's language difficulties.

Temporary aphasia can appear during a migraine. It can occur from a seizure or transient ischemic attack, or TIA, sometimes called a mini-stroke. Anyone who experiences a TIA is at an elevated risk for a full-blown stroke in the future.

Symptoms of aphasia

A person who is affected by aphasia may:.

• Experience difficulty understanding conversations
• Have trouble writing coherent sentences
• Speak in brief or incomplete sentences
• Use words or sentences that don't make sense

Seek medical help immediately if you or a loved one experiences these symptoms. A form of aphasia can be the first sign of stroke .

Types of aphasia

Aphasia presents itself in three different ways. your health care team may classify aphasia as:.

• Broca's (non-fluent) aphasia Non-fluent aphasia is identified as decreased language output, difficulty identifying words and incomplete or short sentences. People with non-fluent aphasia are aware of their communication difficulties as their cognition and comprehension are most commonly still intact.
• Wernicke (fluent) aphasia Fluent aphasia is identified as language output that is incoherent composure of words, word combination errors, grammar mistakes and incorrect word choices. People with fluent aphasia also may have difficulties with cognition and comprehension.
• Global aphasia Global aphasia results from a major stroke that affects the brain more extensively causing cognition, comprehension and language difficulties.

Testing for aphasia

A common initial test from your health care team to determine the cause of aphasia is a CT or MRI.

Aside from that, testing for aphasia usually involves exercises and observations to gauge your ability to:

• Explain a situation depicted on paper
• Follow directions
• Have a conversation
• Read and write
• Repeat words and sentences

Treatment and coping with aphasia

Speech-language therapy is the most common form of treatment for aphasia. Early intervention and timely treatment are imperative for achieving maximum results.

A speech-language pathologist works with patients with aphasia to regain as many previous language skills as possible or, with certain diseases and conditions, to maintain their current communication ability. Treatment exercises often incorporate meaningful activities relevant to the patient to increase motivation and participation. Exercises may include functional tasks, such as ordering food from a menu, writing on a greeting card, or stating your address or birthdate.

In terms of coping, family and friends can adjust by simplifying conversations to ensure comprehension. This allows for active participation for people with aphasia and eases their apprehension about communication. Those with aphasia also may choose to use images and gestures to help them communicate.

Stroke and aphasia support groups also can aid healing and coping for patients and family members.

Aphasia is a challenging communication disorder that creates communication obstacles for patients and their families. Fortunately, raising awareness about the condition, and its underlying causes and treatment options can help reduce the effects of aphasia on many lives.

Delaney Collin s is a speech-language therapist in La Crosse , Wisconsin.

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The Benefits of Speech Therapy

What to expect, frequently asked questions.

A speech-language pathologist (SLP) can help you with speech, language, and swallowing. They provide speech therapy to children and adults who may have speech or language disorders.

People with certain medical conditions may also benefit from speech therapy. Medical conditions that may cause speech or swallowing impairment include traumatic brain injury , stroke (brain damage due to a blood vessel blockage or bleed), and dementia (decline in memory and thinking functions).

This article looks at the various uses for speech therapy, what to expect during a session, and the techniques involved in this type of therapy. 

Verywell / Theresa Chiechi

Speech therapy can help with a variety of conditions.

Speech Disorders

Speech therapy may help with speech disorders like:

• Stuttering : Stuttering may involve repeating parts of words, prolonging words, or struggling to get out certain words. You may be more likely to have a stutter if you have a family history of stuttering.
• Apraxia : This motor speech disorder makes it difficult to move the tongue and lips to make sounds required for speech. In some cases, people with apraxia cannot speak at all. Causes for this disorder include brain tumors, dementia, stroke, and any other condition that causes brain injury.
• Voice : Voice disorders can be temporary or permanent and make it hard to speak. Chronic voice disorders include chronic cough, vocal fold paralysis, vocal polyps (growths on the vocal cords), and spasmodic dysphonia (vocal cord spasms).
• Dysarthria : People with this speech disorder have muscle weakness that makes it difficult to talk. They may slur or mumble their words. Dysarthria can happen due to brain injury or chronic degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s disease or Huntington’s disease .

Language Disorders

A language disorder ( aphasia ) is a condition that makes it difficult for a person to read, write, speak, or understand speech or other modes of communication. 

Someone with this type of disorder may struggle to:

• Use incorrect words for things
• Say complete sentences 
• Understand what other people say
• Understand jokes
• Read or spell 

Brain tumors, traumatic brain injuries, and degenerative disorders that affect cognitive function can all cause aphasia.

Feeding and Swallowing Disorders

Feeding and swallowing disorders can occur in both children and adults. A feeding disorder involves trouble with eating, sucking, drinking from a cup, or chewing. The specific term for swallowing disorders is dysphagia . Children or adults with dysphagia have trouble swallowing food or drink. 

Problems swallowing or feeding may or may not be related to a medical condition. Conditions that may cause a swallowing or feeding disorder include:

• Cleft palate or cleft lip
• Asthma and other breathing issues
• Heart disease
• Premature birth
• Nervous system disorders
• Reflux 
• Muscle weakness 
• Sensory issues
• Autism  
• Behavior problems
• Certain medications

Speech therapy begins with an evaluation to assess your difficulties and whether any structural issues contribute to your speech, language, feeding, or swallowing problems. An evaluation may involve a standardized test to help determine what you most need help with. Informal conversations may also help figure out your needs. 

A speech-language pathologist will then work with you to help improve your ability to speak, converse, or swallow. This may involve:

• Educating you on how to do certain things like articulating or pronouncing sounds
• Teaching you language skills
• Providing you with educational materials
• Giving you exercises to help strengthen your muscles 
• Giving you exercises that help you breathe better
• Participation in group therapy sessions 

You should also expect to practice the skills and exercises you learn in speech therapy sessions at home. Your speech-language pathologist may provide you with workbooks, worksheets, or virtual apps for at-home practice.

Speech Therapy for Adults

Depending on the reason you’re seeking out speech therapy, a speech-language pathologist may:

• Help you learn to move your muscles correctly to make sounds if you have apraxia or dysarthria
• Teach you how to use your breath to speak louder if you have dysarthria
• Help you learn to manage stuttering by teaching you to lower stress levels in certain situations
• Help you strengthen your mouth muscles to make it easier to swallow and eat if you have a feeding or swallowing disorder due to a brain injury or disease

Speech Therapy for Children

A speech-language pathologist’s approach will depend on the child. When working with a child who has a feeding or swallowing disorder, they might focus on:

• Strengthening the muscles of the mouth
• Helping the child with chewing
• Encouraging the child to try new food and drink
• Changing food texture to make it easier to swallow food 
• Helping with sensory issues related to food

Other skills a speech-language pathologist may work on with a child include:

• Language complexity : For example, they might teach words like "and" and "or" to connect ideas within sentences.
• Conversation skills : This may include role-playing to help the child with socialization and improve their read of social cues. 
• Vocabulary : They may use games or storytelling to help build the child’s vocabulary. 
• Phonological awareness : This recognition of the sounds that make up words is an important skill for reading. The SLP may work on helping the child identify sounds and rhymes in words to build this skill.

Healthcare professionals will also test your child’s hearing to see if hearing loss may be contributing to language and speech issues.

If you or your child is getting speech therapy from a qualified speech-language pathologist, you might wonder how likely it is that you’ll see improvement in speech, language, or feeding. 

Results will depend on the individual. It’s also essential to follow the exercises, tips, and strategies provided by the speech-language professional. Regular visits and keeping up with practice activities and exercises make it more likely to see an improvement in yourself or your child. 

A speech-language pathologist works with children or adults who have speech, language, or feeding and swallowing disorders. Typically the first session will involve an evaluation to determine the areas that are causing you the most problems. 

From there, they may teach you exercises and strategies to improve your speech, language, or ability to swallow and eat. 

A Word From Verywell

Think you or your child would benefit from speech therapy? Get in touch with your primary healthcare provider and ask for a recommendation. You can also use the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association’s (ASHA)  Find a Certified SLP Tool . 

Not all children develop at the same rate, but if your child has issues understanding language, doesn’t use gestures, or doesn’t seem to be learning new words, you might consider having them evaluated by a speech therapist. 

While this may depend on the individual and the cause of speech-related problems, research suggests that speech and language therapy can significantly improve speech and language issues.

One example of a typical speech therapy technique is articulation therapy. This technique teaches the person to make specific sounds, sometimes by showing them how to move their mouth or tongue.

A language delay is when a child has difficulty in speaking and understanding speech that is unusual for their age.

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Stuttering .

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Apraxia of speech in adults .

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Voice disorders .

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Dysarthria .

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Aphasia .

American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Feeding and swallowing disorders in children .

Brainline. Speech therapy .

Understood for All. What is speech therapy .

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Languages and speech disorders in children .

Broomfield J, Dodd B. Is speech and language therapy effective for children with primary speech and language impairment? Report of a randomized control trial . Int J Lang Commun Disord . 2011;46(6):628-640. doi:10.1111/j.1460-6984.2011.00039.x

Nemours Children's Health. Speech-language therapy .

By Steph Coelho Steph Coelho is a freelance health and wellness writer and editor with nearly a decade of experience working on content related to health, wellness, mental health, chronic illness, fitness, sexual wellness, and health-related tech.She's written extensively about chronic conditions, telehealth, aging, CBD, and mental health. Her work has appeared in Insider, Healthline, WebMD, Greatist, Medical News Today, and more.

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What is “Recasting” and Why is it Useful in Speech Therapy Sessions?

Recasting. What is recasting exactly? We hear this term a lot but it’s not always clearly explained. Recasting is a great therapy strategy to work on language skills and support students.

Recasting is when you take what a child has said and you repeat it but with more accurate grammar or vocabulary. There are many reasons why this is a great language strategy.

1. You’re honoring the child’s communicative intent

Children or AAC users are frequently ignored when they’re expressing themselves. Children who use echolalia may be ignored because people aren’t sure how to respond to their gestalts. Why? Adults prefer to have adult conversations or maybe they don’t really understand what the child is saying. Children don’t consistently receive feedback. When you’re repeating what they said with correct grammar, you are letting them know that you were listening, you hear them and you care about what they have to say. It’s important to honor students communicative intent and let them know that you are listening and you do care.

Note : I included the sentence about children with echolalia because I do feel that group of children gets ignored often and wanted to acknowledge that. BUT this is a group where you should not necessarily be recasting their utterances. Echolalia serves a purpose as meaningful communication. If you are interested in knowing more about gestalt language processors, the Meaningful Speech Natural Language Acquisition course is incredible! Alexandria Zachos teaches you so much. I feel like such a far more competent clinician after taking this course. So I just wanted to include that note about students who use gestalts.

2. Recasting benefits students working on syntactic skills

Emphasize the grammatical element you’re working on. The student will hear the change and it will draw their attention to that syntactic alteration. Let’s look at how to do this. Imagine you’re watching a video where one child takes something away from the other and the student says “that’s hims!” I might say “oh yeah! That’s his,” with a slightly louder and longer duration on the word “his”. This draws the child’s attention to it and gets their brain working on why I said some thing different and figuring out those grammatical structures. It gets their attention but it also doesn’t take away from the meaningful communication interaction. Sometimes direct teaching is a good way to go, and sometimes we need the language therapy to be more naturalistic. It depends on the context. So it’s a great way to target grammar and emphasizing grammatical structures.

3. Recasting supports students working on semantics skills

Recasting is not only for grammatical structures. You can acknowledge what a child has said and add more words so that it is more specific. How? For example, if we are looking at a book, and a child says “that’s a dog”, I might say “that’s a big dog”, or “that’s an angry dog”. Both of these include what the child has said but introduces new elements that can support expanding their vocabulary repertoire.

4. Recasting supports AAC users

Many AAC users are just learning language with their devices. Communication partners can understand them for the first time in their lives. For many AAC users it’s their first time accessing language so we can’t expect them to have perfect grammar or correct sentence structures all the time. So how can you recast with AAC users so it remains a natural and meaningful interaction?

I have a perfect example for this, which happened today. I spilled some coffee on my laptop in a session. Luckily the laptop is fine but I said “oh my gosh!” One of my students said “Miss Lexi coffee spill computer you”. I was so excited that she said that! I said with verbally “yes I did spill coffee on my laptop”, and then with her AAC device I use the word “I” because I was talking about myself but I said on her device “I spill coffee on laptop” and emphasized the word “on” verbally as I added it on her AAC device. It’s very similar to what she said but I included a preposition to increase her syntactic accuracy.

5. Recasting keeps language sessions and language intervention natural.

We never want to be robotic or rigid during our sessions because it doesn’t help our students. It doesn’t make language fluid or contextual the way it is when we use it every day. Language is meaningful because we are communicating something. Often there’s an emotional component to language, a goal that needs to be met or a social aspect. Language has a purpose.

So when we use language in ways that don’t feel purposeful, like telling students “say his, it’s not hims, it’s his, say his”, it’s not going to be as meaningful. The more meaningfully we can use language in context the more quickly students will learn the structures.

Now go out and do some recasting!

Now you know why and how to recast your students utterances. I hope this was helpful and you found it enjoyable to read. If you’re looking for more information about recasting I’ll link some articles below. Looking for other language teaching strategies for therapy sessions? Here’s a blog post about descriptive teaching . Thank you for reading! I hope you’ve gotten some ideas about how to implement recasting with your students!

The Efficacy of Recasts in Language Intervention: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Parental Recasts and Production of Copulas and Articles by Children With Specific Language Impairment and Typical Langua ge

Dose Schedule and Enhanced Conversational Recast Treatment for Children With Specific Language Impairment

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60 Speech Therapy Sentences forSpeech Therapy Practice

As promised here are the sentences for  your unlimited use .

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Speech Therapy Sentences

• My mom drove me to school fifteen minutes late on Tuesday.
• The girl wore her hair in two braids, tied with two blue bows.
• The mouse was so hungry he ran across the kitchen floor without even looking for humans.
• The tape got stuck on my lips so I couldn't talk anymore.
• The door slammed down on my hand and I screamed like a little baby.
• My shoes are blue with yellow stripes and green stars on the front.
• The mailbox was bent and broken and looked like someone had knocked it over on purpose.
• I was so thirsty I couldn't wait to get a drink of water.
• I found a gold coin on the playground after school today.
• The chocolate chip cookies smelled so good that I ate one without asking.
• My bandaid wasn't sticky any more so it fell off on the way to school.
• He had a sore throat so I gave him my bottle of water and told him to keep it.
• The church was white and brown and looked very old.
• I was so scared to go to a monster movie but my dad said he would sit with me so we went last night.
• Your mom is so nice she gave me a ride home today.
• I fell in the mud when I was walking home from school today.
• This dinner is so delicious I can't stop eating.
• The school principal was so mean that all the children were scared of him.
• I went to the dentist the other day and he let me pick a prize out of the prize box.
• The box was small and wrapped in paper with tiny silver and red glitter dots.
• My dad is so funny that he told us jokes all night long and we never fell asleep.
• The camping trip was so awesome that I didn't want to come home.
• Are you going to have a blue birthday cake for your next birthday?
• How did you know that I was going to have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch?
• That boy is so mean that he doesn't care if a door slams in your face or if he cuts in line.
• The moms and dads all sat around drinking coffee and eating donuts.
• My mom made a milkshake with frozen bananas and chocolate sauce.
• My pen broke and leaked blue ink all over my new dress.
• I got my haircut today and they did it way too short.
• My pet turtle, Jim, got out of his cage and I could not find him anywhere.

SEE ALSO:   The Best Free App for Speech Therapy

• The dog was so tired he fell asleep on the way to his doghouse.
• My mom drives a green jeep and my dad drives a black truck.
• Your sister is my best friend because she always shares her treats with me.
• My pet Roger is white and fluffy and he loves to eat carrots.
• Your neighbor is annoying because he cut down my trees.
• The tape was so sticky it got stuck to my fingers and wouldn't come off.
• My glass of water broke when it fell off the table.
• The clock was ticking and kept me awake all night.
• My dad told me that I was his favorite person in the whole wide world.
• The chickens were running around and pecking worms out of the ground.
• The game looked fun but all the pieces were missing.
• I got my finger stuck in the door when I slammed it.
• I was so mad that I yelled at him at the top of my lungs.
• My favorite dress is ruined because I spilled ketchup on it last night.
• My home is bright pink and has yellow flowers growing all around it.
• My buddy is going to pick me up after school and give me a ride to work.
• I don't know where my list of friends went to invite them to my birthday party.
• The gum was stuck under the desk and I couldn't get it off.
• The baby was so cute but she was crying so loud I had to plug my ears.
• The flowers smelled beautiful and made the room so happy.
• My sister likes to eat cheese on her peanut butter sandwich and pickles on her ice cream.
• The alligator's teeth were so scary that I ran back to the car as fast as I could.
• Her dress was blue with white and pink polka dots, but it was ripped down the back.
• The puzzle took me so long to put together that I threw it in the garbage.
• He was driving me crazy so I told a joke and made him laugh.
• I started walking home and my feet got so tired I had to stop and take breaks.
• I piled my books in my arms and then they fell all over the floor.
• The dog chased the cat around the block 4 times.
• My lunch box had a peanut butter sandwich, crackers, juice, and a cheese stick in it.
• I accidentally left my money in my pants pocket and it got ruined in the washer.

This list of functional words was professionally selected to be the most useful for a child or adult who needs practice with speech therapy sentences.

We encourage you to use this list when practicing speech therapy sentences at home.

Home practice will make progress toward meeting individual language goals much faster.

Speech-Language Pathologists (SLPs) are only able to see students/clients 30-60 mins (or less) per week. This is not enough time or practice for someone to strengthen their understanding of this important language concept.

Every day that your loved one goes without practice it becomes more difficult to help them. 

SEE ALSO:   The Best Books for Speech Therapy Practice

We know life is busy , but if you're reading this you're probably someone who cares about helping their loved one as much as you can.

Practice 5-10 minutes whenever you can, but try to do it on a consistent basis (daily).

Please, please, please use this list to practice.

It will be a great benefit to you and your loved one's progress.

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The Complete Guide to Use Repetition in Speeches

Hrideep barot.

• Public Speaking , Speech Writing

All of us are very well acquainted with the speech “I Have a Dream” by Martin Luther King Jr. In the speech he used the phrase “I have a dream” 8 times. He does that to emphasize the importance of integrated and united America to the audience.

What if this repetition had not been there in this speech? Do you think that this speech would have been so famous? Speeches with repetition create an enormous impact on the audience.

Repetition is a literary device that very often is used in speeches or any piece of writing. It has a profound impact on the readers or audiences. It means to repeat words, phrases, or sounds to call attention to what is being repeated.

Here’s the game plan for this article.

Why are Speeches with Repetition so Impactful?

1. frequency, 2. nature of speech , 3. familiarity, 4. rule of 3.

• 1. Don't Cram Up
• 2. Don't Use Words Lazily
• 3. Don't Use Repetition More than 5-6 Times

1. It Persuades the Audience to Give the Theme Importance

Research paper by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino has shown when a sentence or phrase is repeated over and over again it is considered to be the truth by the audience. This is called the illusory truth effect. This effect allows the audience to be on the same page with the speaker.

2. When we repeat words or phrases with the theme involved in them we strengthen the theme

An example could be a poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The poem “and miles to go before I sleep” is repeated twice at the end. The poet wants to grab attention to death, but before death, he has responsibilities to fulfill. 

Please note: repetition along with the style of speaking and body language plays an integral role.

You can check out our articles on body language and learn about appropriate body language while delivering a speech, the link also takes you to articles that provide additional and intriguing information about body language. This information is often neglected but turns out to be crucial.  

3. It Gives Rhythm to the Speech 

Repetition is an integral part of poetry. Repetition gives rhythm or a pattern to poetry. That means with repetition in a poem or speech, the audience tries to anticipate the next words or phrases. 

The audience does that because they have seen the pattern in the poem or speech and therefore they automatically try to guess the next words. Hence making your speech interactive and interesting.    

Check out the victory speech given by Barack Obama, “ yes we can ”. 

4. Repetition helps in Learning and Recall

Research published by Frontier in Human Neuroscience has shown repetition helps in learning and increases memory performance for detailed and associative information. Repetition also helps in the recall of the information that is put in memory by association. 

New research by Carnegie Mellon University psychologists shows when you associate new information with previously known information chances of remembering the information increase. 

The human brain is designed in a way that information gets inside the memory when repeated. That’s also true for forming habits. A habit is formed when an activity is repeated over and over again for days.  

With repetition, you will be able to get your phrases or words inside the memory of the audience, and hence that will make people remember you and your speech. 

How can you Create Speeches with Repetition?

Choose the appropriate word, phrase, or sound according to your speech: 

The sound, word, or phrase for the speech which you want to repeat should be chosen such that it becomes easy for the brain to process it. 

Use smaller and simpler words and sentences to be accessible for the audience.

Let’s look at an example:

“I felt happy because I saw that the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.” Roberto Bolano

The word “happy” is repeated here. Happy is the fundamental word we use to connect positive feelings with.  

The speech should be constructed in such a way that the repetition is spread out evenly throughout the speech. This allows the brain to process information. The clogged-up information overwhelms and confuses the audience.  

The Gettysburg address by former US president Abraham Lincoln is a good example of this.

If the topic you choose to speak about is highly emotional, then the repetition can be highly frequent. It gives a dramatic effect to the speech. But if the topic is informational then the repetition if used frequently can create awkwardness.

For highly informative speeches you can use phrases or words which convey the same meaning.  The audience is likely to respond optimistically with such an approach. In such a way the audience has an impression that you have thoroughly researched and studied the topic. 

Use repetition with objects with which the audience is familiar. Studies, as mentioned above, show when you associate new information with already known information the chances of remembering it increases. 

That is how the audience will remember your speech or the information you shared even when the speech is over. 

An example could be: 

“Almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting” Joshua Ferris (Then We Came to the End)

This seems to be the story of every frustrated employee.  

History says when anything is presented in a group of three it looks or sounds or is sensed complete. Did you notice what I did there?

Let’s look at some examples: 

The three wise monkeys: “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil”

Fire safety slogan: stop, drop and roll 

Rights in US declaration of independence: Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Figures of speech that use repetition: 

Numerous figures of speech use repetition according to sound, words, phrases, etc. You can understand each of them with examples and that will give you an understanding about using them in a grammatically correct way. 

Things to Keep in Mind While you are Using Repetition

1. don’t cram up.

When you use repetition without proper intervals or jam up information, it gets difficult for the audience to process that information. The human brain is designed to take simple information at frequent intervals.

2. Don’t Use Words Lazily

When you repeat words and phrases over and over again without any purpose or definite meaning attached to them, the audience becomes disinterested. That happens because they think you do not have a better choice of words.

For example: 

I went to the garden, she was still there in the garden, and I came back home from the garden. 

3. Don’t Use Repetition More than 5-6 Times

Studies have shown moderate to low levels of repetition can serve as a great persuasive tactic. But when it is used more than that it serves the opposite purpose. Studies say the audience seems to disagree with arguments when repetition is used excessively.  

Nobody is born with the skills of King Martin Luther or Barack Obama. They practiced for hours to improve their oratory skills. So don’t be afraid of failures or mistakes, execute and make use of every opportunity you have. Learning from your failures will make you a good orator. 

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Sentence Repetition Drill for 3, 4, 5, & 6 Word Functional Sentences & Questions

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I noticed many of my 5-to-7 year-olds (plus/minus a couple of years) drop the little words like “to”, articles, helping verbs, and s-markers. They also sometimes have trouble with question formation. So, I made these sentences for some warm-up or drill work during games.

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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science > Audio and Speech Processing

Title: attention-constrained inference for robust decoder-only text-to-speech.

Abstract: Recent popular decoder-only text-to-speech models are known for their ability of generating natural-sounding speech. However, such models sometimes suffer from word skipping and repeating due to the lack of explicit monotonic alignment constraints. In this paper, we notice from the attention maps that some particular attention heads of the decoder-only model indicate the alignments between speech and text. We call the attention maps of those heads Alignment-Emerged Attention Maps (AEAMs). Based on this discovery, we propose a novel inference method without altering the training process, named Attention-Constrained Inference (ACI), to facilitate monotonic synthesis. It first identifies AEAMs using the Attention Sweeping algorithm and then applies constraining masks on AEAMs. Our experimental results on decoder-only TTS model VALL-E show that the WER of synthesized speech is reduced by up to 20.5% relatively with ACI while the naturalness and speaker similarity are comparable.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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