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From: Ryan Pollard
Date: 06 Oct 2012
Time: 19:59:45 -0500
Remote Name: 69.116.220.90
The Van Riperian therapy you describe can certainly be quite effective, and often has the added bonus of producing a person who won’t have to deal with the dilemma (the “identity crisis,” if you will) addressed in my paper. Clients typically leave such treatment with some level of residual stuttering that is manageable and acceptable to them. They’re therefore not attempting to assume new roles as normally fluent speakers. But I wouldn’t call most speech restructuring regimens deficient in producing fluent speech; in fact, they tend to do that very well and very rapidly. To my mind, they’re only deficient insofar as they fail to adequately address the underlying reasons why clients might not be able to use their newly learned skills after leaving therapy. Needless to say, many of them would qualify as deficient based on that criterion.