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From: Dale Williams
Date: 10/8/01
Time: 8:13:23 AM
Remote Name: 209.214.12.12
Tom, you raise a very important issue. I’ve always thought cueing was important to the transfer/maintenance problems common to stuttering therapy. For a given individual who stutters, there are cues—e.g., situations, emotions, the social factors you mention, and others—that trigger stuttering. Conversely, speech is relatively easy in a treatment environment where the only cues there are represent past success, encouragement, and lack of communicative pressure (this is particularly true if treatment consists of fluency-enhancing techniques like stretched phonemes or easy onset in short syllables). However, once the client leaves this safe environment and faces real life (with many times more cues of past failures), implementation of skills learned in therapy will be far more difficult. As has been implied in other responses, facing these cues of past failure armed only with speech techniques is a losing battle. Therapy must address the cues themselves.
Dale