The Professional Is In

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Re: Lidcombe programme

From: Ken Logan
Date: 05 Oct 2012
Time: 22:58:23 -0500
Remote Name: 98.70.54.188

Comments

Great questions. I agree with the things Nan mentioned and, to her list of explanatory factors, I might add "enhanced or focused attention/awareness." That is, it seems reasonable to think that the highlighting of stuttering-relevant behaviors like disfluency in a program like Lidcombe (i.e., "that was smooth/bumpy") enhances the speaker's attention to/awareness of certain key facets of speech production. It's hard to change something if one is inattentive to it or unaware of it. I'm speculating here, of course, but it's probably not the focused attention, per se, that facilitates fluency, but more that focused attention leads to other changes or modifications that do facilitate speech production. It is interesting to note that many fluency therapy approaches (for example, Lidcombe, "time out," the "identification" phase of traditional stuttering modification therapy) all have a feedback or behavioral labeling component to them. One final point, it is also interesting to note that focused attention seems to have a helpful effect on movement performance in many other disorders, particularly those that stem from problems in the basal ganglia.


Last changed: 10/22/12