The Dominic Barker Trust,
or Dom’s Fund, was set up in 1997 in memory of Dominic, who had a
persistent stammer and who took his own life in 1994, aged 26. Fluent
speech is something that most of us are able to take for granted. Those
who stutter or stammer, however, expend huge amounts of unseen energy on
struggling to communicate, thinking ahead to avoid problem words and
feeling the pressure to get their words out before the listener either
jumps in to rescue them, or turns away. People who stutter often
experience not only frustration and isolation but also discrimination at
all sorts of levels. Through our funding, we enable research into the
causes and treatments of stammering, and we support the clinical work of
Speech and Language Therapists and practical research at ground level.
We also support local and national initiatives to reduce the shame,
prejudice and ignorance around stuttering.
Smart Talking is a web application developed by Dr. Avin Mirawdeli and
Dr. Jenny Gibson's team at the University of Cambridge, utilizing speech
recognition technology to assess children's speech and language skills.
The app targets parents and teachers, offering norm-referenced scores
and referral support, aiming to empower users to seek help for children
with speech difficulties. Additionally, interventions and resources like
the Star Talking Fluency Workbook are being developed and trialed to
support families of young children who stammer, providing practical
tools for promoting fluent speech at home.
Research at Oxford University, supervised by Professors Kate Watkins and
Charlotte Stagg, includes a comprehensive investigation by Birtan
Demirel into cerebral dominance in people who stammer, functional brain
differences during speech, and the efficacy of transcranial alternating
current stimulation (tACS) for speech improvement, alongside pioneering
methods for stuttering reduction during presentations. Additionally,
Naheem Bashir's work, funded by UCL and the DBT, explores brain
stimulation techniques to enhance speech production in both fluent
speakers and those who stammer, aiming to uncover mechanisms behind
stammering for future therapeutic targets. Furthermore, Dr. Silviya
Doneva's research, supported by the DBT and supervised by Prof. Penny
Cavenagh, focuses on attentional performance in stammering adults,
shedding light on potential links between stammering severity and
attention difficulties.