ESTABLISHMENT OF LIGHT ARTICULATORY CONTACTS

Rationale: Children and adolescents who stutter frequently produce consonants with hard articulatory contacts. Hard contacts are the source of a great deal of articulatory tension and may result in the impedance of airflow in the oral cavity. Teaching the client to produce soft, loose articulatory movements is helpful in reducing the articulatory tension. Light contacts are also helpful in providing the child with a tool to reduce tension during the stuttering moment.

Activities/Techniques:

  1. Teach the client the concept of soft, loose sounds. Emphasizing the "feeling" of loose articulatory movements and smooth, continuous airflow. How relaxed does the tongue feel? "Soft sounds" can be taught at the phoneme level and incorporated into activities that follow a hierarchy of increased length and linguistic complexity up through conversation.

  2. Use of a delayed auditory feedback unit (DAF) may be used with older children to facilitate light articulatory contacts through abnormally slowed rate at the single word through reading levels.

  3. Voluntary stretches, accomplished by lengthening or prolonging the first syllable of a word, involves soft, slow articulation of the consonant and prolonged phonation of the vowel. These stretches may be incorporated in single words through conversational tasks.

  4. Contrast drills are a helpful activity to increase the client's awareness of hard vs. articulatory contacts. Be sure to emphasize kinesthetic awareness. Have the child read from a list of words alternating hard and soft productions of each word. Encourage the client to feel the difference while the clinician explains why they are different.

  5. The clinician may demonstrate several samples of the clients' stuttering behaviors and then demonstrate how he/she can stutter more easily. The clinician may slow down a repetition, stretch out of a block, or do an easy repetition to ease out of laryngeal block.

  6. The following excerpt is from Dell, "Treating The School-Age Stutterer," and describes a method of teaching light, loose articulatory contacts:

    When you are stuttering hard on it, you will feel your tongue jammed up against the alveolar ridge. You will also feel air pressure building up behind your tongue. The air wants to escape but you are forcing it back with your tongue. Now gradually loosen the pressure on your tongue by reducing the force of the air pressure pushing up against it. Then gradually begin to relax the tension you have purposely placed on your tongue. When you remove some of this lingual pressure, you will probably hear a little burst of air escaping between the tongue and the alveolar ridge. You then need to change these bursts into a small, steady stream of air, it is easy to add the voicing necessary and once again slide into the work but beware of prolonging the vowel. It should be tttable' not taable'.

  7. Cancellations may be employed to further facilitate awareness of light articulatory. Immediately after the stuttering moment, the child should repeat the work with a light articulatory contact. "This technique allows the child to reattempt a work in which the coarticulatory gestures have not been smoothly produced." (Wall and Myers).

Back toComponents Index

Back to Stuttering Home Page