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From: Graham Schenck
Date: 21 Oct 2010
Time: 23:16:19 -0500
Remote Name: 98.215.59.161
Hey Carly, I am working on my M.S. in speech pathology at Illinois State University, and I am also a person who stutters. Determining effective fluency generating techniques that work outside of therapy depends totally on the individual client. I took 4 years of therapy before beginning my undergraduate degree, and my therapist and I used a Van Riper-esque behavioral approach to focus on identification of disfluencies, desensitization to the negative stigma of stuttering, modification techniques, and eventually long-term maintenance of learned techniques. This type of therapy was particularly effective for me, but there is simply too much variability in stuttering treatment overall to advocate for one particular technique or intervention over another. If you ever have the opportunity to work with a fluency client in the future (particularly adolescents or adults), you should focus on building a solid rapport initially, and ensure that your client trusts you before you begin actual therapy. You want to learn as much as you can about your client (i.e. feared situations, difficult sounds, etc.) so that you can construct your therapy approach based on their needs. To address your question on rate of speech and fluency, most stuttering therapy focuses on the client using a slower rate than usual to produce fluent speech. Using a faster rate of speech puts more pressure on the speaker, and also stresses the muscles of respiration and articulation/phonation (especially if the client does not have proper breath support). Speaking at a faster rate also requires faster cognitive processing, and clients who are consciously thinking about modifying all the time will generally struggle to do so effectively.