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From: John Tetnowski
Date: 11 Oct 2004
Time: 11:41:35 -0500
Remote Name: 130.70.143.78
Dear Sean and Cathy, You really do ask the million dollar question when you ask whether stuttering will persist, or whether it will go away. There are two competing schools of thought at this time. One school of thought looks to see what signs are present in children who begin to stutter that will predict whether they will recover spontaneously or continue to stutter. The work at the University of Illinois by Yairi and Ambrose seeks specifically to answer this question. They have followed many children over a number of years and still cannot positively answer your question. There are indeed children who have stuttered for over 3 and 4 years that will recover on their own. If we look for key factors that relate to this prediction, the answer is not universally clear. However, their data seems to show that if the stuttering remains constant or gets worse, the liklihood of full recovery from stuttering is less. This group also uses a term called "stuttering-like disfluencies", that refers to the specific types of speech beahviors that are shown in children who stutter. These also show predictive value. On the other side of the debate are a group of researchers from Australia (Onslow, Packman, Harrison). Their data tends to say, get started with stuttering intervention as soon as possible. If the stuttering might go away on its own, that may be OK, but if we intervene, we may eliminate it faster and more efficiently (just as we take an aspirin for a headache.....it may go away on its own, but we take the aspirin to get rid of the headache faster). You see, there is not a positively clear answer. A key is to have your son in therapy by someone who "really" understands stuttering. They should be the ones who help you make your decision. Thanks for the question. John Tetnowski