causes of stammering. These original or basic causes in their
various ramifications are almost as numerous as the cases of
speech disorders themselves, but they fall into a comparatively
few well-defined classes.

These original causes in many cases do not appear to have been the
direct and immediate cause of the trouble, but rather a
predisposing cause or a cause which brought about a condition that
later developed into stuttering or stammering.

Let us set down a list of the more common of these causes, not
with the expectation of having the list complete but rather of
giving facts about the representative or more common Basic
Predisposing Causes of Stuttering and Stammering.

A little more than 96 per cent. of the causes of stammering which
the author has examined can be traced back to one of the five
causes shown below:

1--Mimicry or Imitation
2--Fright or severe nerve shock
3--Fall or injury of some sort
4--Heredity
5--Disease

Let us take up these familiar causes of stuttering or stammering
in the order in which we have set them down and learn something
more of them.

The first and one of the most common causes is Mimicry, or, as it