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From: Greg S
Date: 19 Oct 2007
Time: 10:43:55 -0500
Remote Name: 130.74.194.77
What a great question! An entire book could probably be written on this topic. It’s been my experience that an SLP should work on both artic and stuttering, because progress may be limited if one is attended to the exclusion of the other. A perfect example is a client I once had. His stuttering did not seem all that severe, but his articulation was extraordinarily severe. So much so that most SLPs believed that he had developmental apraxia. (And that was a tempting diagnosis to make, even by my own admission.) However, the longer I worked with the client, I realized that his artic errors weren’t artic errors at all--but rather stuttering secondary behaviors that were out of control. So we worked on bouncing and prolonging sounds (i.e., stuttering treatment) while working on the articulation errors. And by using volitional stuttering to scrub away the secondary behaviors, most of the artic errors were “fixed” also. So in summary--by all means, work on both.