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From: Ken Logan
Date: 22 Apr 2010
Time: 13:28:02 -0500
Remote Name: 128.227.11.102
Dear Janine, Yes, the rate management techniques described here could be used with stuttering too. In fact, the prolonged speech (articulation rate management) technique I describe in the paper is one of the most frequently used approaches to treating stuttering in adolescents and adults. And the research data shows that many people stutter substantially less after learning to implement the technique. Interestingly, pausing is mentioned much less often as a stuttering management technique (at least in the textbooks I've been reading!), but if you think about it, it makes sense that it would work at reducing the frequency of disfluency because it breaks speech into relatively short little chunks, which would presumably be less demanding to produce from a motor execution standpoint. We have seen some clients use the pausing strategy successfully. It's not for everyone though. Some clients have lots of trouble initiating speech, and more pauses means more places to re-initiate speech.