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From: John Tetnowski
Date: 22 Oct 2010
Time: 09:48:40 -0500
Remote Name: 130.70.138.144
Robert, There is some very good research to address your questions and concerns. Some of the best research on this area of course comes from the work of Ehud Yairi and his colleagues. They have carefully studied and outlined what the predictive factors are for whether children are likely to recover from stuttering or whether it will persist. Some of these factors include clinician-measured variables, with the most important one being a "weighted stuttering-like disfluency" measure. How this changes over time is highly predictable. Other factors including gender, family history, type of disfluency also have fairly strong predictive value. I think that there is some very good research out there to help us make these decisions. It is not 100% reliable, but it is way better than making uninformed guesses. By the way, much of Yairi's data is summarized in his two recent books, Stuttering Foundatiosn and Clinical Applications (2011), and Early Childhood Stuttering (2005). Thanks for the question, John T.