Stuttering Treatment Research

Stuttering Treatment Research – 

Speech Journal Review of Prolonged Speech Stuttering Treatment Research – including the Stutter-Free Speech Program and the MPI Stuttering Treatment Program.

From:

A Research-Based Clinical Tutorial in Adolescent Stuttering: Response to Coleman, Miller, and Weidner (2015)

A substantial body of stuttering treatment research has established the effectiveness of prolonged speech, smooth speech, and related treatments for achieving stutter-free natural sounding speech with adolescents and adults (for reviews, see Andrews et al., 1980; Bothe et al., 2006; Nye et al., 2013).

Furthermore, many researchers describe variations on prolonged speech or smooth speech treatments, each with its own details. But the key elements in all variations are quite similar.

Stuttering Treatment Research Results

As a result, they include reduced rate and continuous vocalization in the early stages.  We observe increasing rate and more typical phonation patterns as treatment progresses; gentle or easy initiation of each utterance and/or of elements within utterances and connected speech sounds that flow together within each phrase; and an intonation pattern that emphasizes the phrase level (i.e., stress-timed, rather than syllable-timed, speech production).

Also, important infrastructural elements have been identified as well, including initial intensive scheduling, practice at home, or both; self-evaluation and self-management of treatment steps; and incorporation of generalization goals and tasks into the structure of treatment from the beginning, among other features (Andrews et al., 1980; Bothe et al., 2006; Ingham, 1982).

So these approaches have been demonstrated to result in the substantial reduction or even elimination of stuttering, across a wide variety of treatment program details (Boberg & Kully, 1994; Craig et al., 1996; Euler & Wolff von Gudenberg, 2000; O’Brian, Onslow, Cream, & Packman, 2003).