Helping Clients Regulate Speech Rate

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Re: One technique or Both?

From: Ken Logan
Date: 27 Apr 2010
Time: 22:14:38 -0500
Remote Name: 98.70.53.160

Comments

This is a good question too. There has been relatively little systematic research into treatment outcomes with groups of people who clutter, so it's important to collect data and monitor the person's performance carefully. As a general rule, it's important to first determine what type of problems the person has (e.g., disorganized language; unintelligible speech; disfluent speech; etc.). As I mention in the article, I've seen some cluttering adults who make marked improvements in language organization and fluency simply by pausing a bit more often. Regulation of articulation rate can be particularly helpful for improving intelligibility, especially in cases where the the un-intelligibility is associate with weak syllable deletion. So...I'd suggest that you begin with "diagnostic therapy" (basically a "trial run"). The pausing is pretty simple to teach...so that might be a good starting point, particularly if fluency (i.e., frequent revisions) and linguistic organization are being targeted. This will give you a sense for the types of real-world changes the person might realize via the technique and it will also allow you to gauge whether the person finds one technique preferable to another. I always tell patients that their first impressions of a particular technique may not necessarily be a good indication of its long-term usefulness or how they'll eventually feel about its naturalness. Still, I think it's important to talk with people along the way about how they think these techniques work/feel.


Last changed: 05/06/10