Stuttering is a disturbance in the normal flow of the speech of an individual. Each person speaks occasionally with such type of symptoms, without however facing the danger of being characterized as stutterer. The difference between someone who stutters and someone who shows normal instabilities in the flow of his speech lies in the number of instabilities as well as in their form. In the normal disturbances entire words are usually repeated, appear "quiet" (eg Can … was Kostas) or "full" pauses (eg "I…mm…eee.. do not want to eat", interruptions or even rehandlings of sentences (eg I was yesterday … where do you go?) while in stuttering phonemes or syllables are primarily repeated. Almost all the children, in the duration of their linguistic development, experience between the ages of 2 and 5, a phase with many instabilities in the flow of speech.

This does not have to worry us as long as the child does not present marks of lassitude and great effort at the duration of speech. Stuttering can appear for the first time at the beginning of school life, while more seldom it makes his appearance at the adultness