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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 19 Oct 2007
Time: 13:11:29 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.19
Dear Tricia, This is a good question. What you we recommend for early elementary-aged boys who have easy prolongations on mid-word sounds and who may or may not be aware of them? Perhaps the reason nobody has jumped in to answer it is that the question is not easy to answer. Even so, let me take a stab at it. I first would question whether or not there is a complete lack of tension. Even though you might not be able to see or hear tension, I would tend to look further myself because (1) prolongations are often typical of stuttering that has worsened and (2) I would be suspicious that the boys were not concerned about them. Woody Starkweather observed a number of years ago that stuttering was remarkable in the sense that children as young as two often pretend it does not bother them. I believe I would start out with a fluency shaping approach as follows. First, I would want to find out what the youngster knows about stuttering and what it feels like to be stopped/slowed by the prolongations. I'd consider using a number of available suggestions to try to reduce any strong aversion to talking about stuttering and to reduce any fears, embarrassment, and so on. Like many identification and desensitization approaches, I would want to know all the things the child does when and because he stutters. I would also want to get the perspectives of the parents, siblings, teachers, and friends. After that, I believe I would try a smooth and easy speech modeling approach first, teaching a slower rate, easy vocal onset, and light articulatory contact. I would not expect the child to imitate my models in the exaggerated way I would model them, but I would look for changes. Hopefully, he would either imitate some, reduce his stuttering over the first few weeks, or both. I would also probably begin to model some easy repetitions to show him an easy, repetitive form of stuttering. Why repetition? Because I have found that it is easy to stutter easily and repetitively on all classes of sounds, vowels, continuant consonants, fricatives, stops, etc. It is also easier to model taking a breath if one is running out of breath in a prolongation or block. If there are no changes in a month or so, I would begin to reinforce him for imitating me (to some degree). I would also want him to start demonstrating some easy repetitions, even if they are not real stutters. For example, I might use some pairs of nonsense figures ("aliens") with names like "biiiiip" and "bi-bii-biii-biiiip." Talking about both of these "aliens" would require using easy repetitions. If I still did not get a change in a couple of months, I believe I would consider a more direct approach to teaching the targets, first with single words, and then progressing to longer speech segments. I would consider any of a number of good approaches, such as Guitar's integration of approaches, Cooper and Cooper's FIGS, and others. Ellen Bennett's new book has nice summaries of many of these approaches. So to most of the available textbooks. I hope this helps a little. Good luck. Ken