Unusual Speech Issue

by Shannan

This issue has manifested itself more recently as I have started being a lot more social and just speaking more in general. Essentially what happens is after a reasonably long period of speaking, I feel as if my mouth muscles 'give way'. My speech then becomes 'slurred', but not in a way I would consider typical.

Every morning for the last few months I have been doing vocal exercises to 'warm up' my voice for speaking, followed by reading a few pages of a book out loud. I started doing this because I noticed that my speech was naturally a little slurred in general and that I needed to work on my enunciation.

This has been a HUGE help to me. I have seldom had any issues speaking clearly and articulating myself since. The only time I had any trouble was after I would speak for longer periods of time in a social encounter.

So I decided to take this one step further. As an experiment, I carried out my reading out loud each morning for longer to see if I reached this 'slurring point'. I did. I can verbalize around 5 pages of this particular book before I come to a point where my mouth muscles just refuse to cooperate anymore.

Don't get me wrong, it's not horrendously bad - I can still read to a decent standard, but I find that every 5 or 10 words or so I struggle to articulate it correctly, and feel the need to stop momentarily to 'reset' my mouth muscles.

Reading doesn't come naturally after this point, and it is a huge struggle to continue on. If I stop and don't speak much for a few hours, I feel as though my mouth 'resets' and I am fine to speak normally again.

If anyone has any input as to what they think is going on and/or can point me in the right direction for rectifying this, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you!