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From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 07 Oct 2008
Time: 10:06:02 -0500
Remote Name: 165.155.192.76
Judy, great question. Let me speak about elementary school children and older children as well. It has been my experience that using speech tools often means that we are tampering down the child’s natural excitement and enthusiasm for speaking. Speech tools are not only speaking in a different manner, but they often require the speaker to sound less dynamic. It seems to me that children (and many adults) are not resisting identify change, but are resisting sounding, well, “boring” or “weird.” I know that we SLP folks are fond of saying that speech tools should become natural sounding, but for many, they don’t. In addition, some children (and adults) who stutter associate “fluency” strategies more with stuttering than with “normal” sounding speech. I can show my 4th and 5th graders videos of themselves stuttering and then speaking “fluently” using speech tools. Mom and dad are impressed by the “fluency” takes, but the child is often much less impressed. For the children I work with, I don’t sense it is about a loss of identify. I feel it is more about all of the effort it takes to use speaking strategies, the unnatural sounding aspect of speech tools and the lack of motivation to focus on such strategies.