Assessments of oral reading are widely used for screening, progress monitoring, and comprehensive evaluations. Despite the utility and technical adequacy of these tools, there are subgroups of students for whom measures of oral reading may be inappropriate. The first section of this article focuses on how tests of oral reading may underestimate…

Deaf individuals who use American Sign Language (ASL) are rarely the focus of professionals in speech-language pathology. Although society is widely thought of in terms of those who speak, this norm is not all-inclusive. Many signing individuals exhibit disorders in signed language and need treatment much like their speaking peers. Although there…

Background: It is widely known that most young children recover from stuttering. Evaluations of this spontaneous recovery vary from 40 to 80% of stuttering children. However, if the child is already older than 6 years of age, the spontaneous recovery will be less likely. The effectiveness of stuttering treatment, and especially fluency shaping…

Purpose: The contribution of genetic factors in the persistence of and early recovery from stuttering was assessed. Method: Data from the Twins Early Development Study were employed. Parental reports regarding stuttering were collected at ages 2, 3, 4, and 7 years, and were used to classify speakers into recovered and persistent groups. Of 12,892…

Several authors have suggested that devices delivering altered auditory feedback (AAF) may be a viable treatment for adults and children who stutter. This paper reviews published, peer reviewed journal papers from the past 10 years that investigate the effect of AAF during different speaking conditions, tasks and situations. A review of that…

Background: Speech and language therapists treating children who stutter appear to be assigned a difficult task. Natural spontaneous remission accounts for approximately 60-80% of all children recovering from stuttering. Despite our best efforts, no protocol has ever shown its effectiveness separate from natural recovery rates (i.e. 60-80%).…

The study comparing perceptual judgments of speech disfluency by 20 mothers of either stuttering or normally fluent children found no appreciable differences between groups in their judgments. Both groups of mothers most frequently judged sound/syllable repetitions to be stuttered, followed by whole-word repetitions and broken words. (Author/DB)

Background: Similar positive results (e.g. immediate decreases in stuttering frequency and a 60-80% recovery rate from stuttering) have been reported for numerous therapeutic protocols for treating childhood stuttering, many of which have been diametrically opposite in their orientations and implementations. For example, Johnson advocated indirect…

A recent forum in "JFD" (28/3, 2003) evaluated the status of evidence-based practice in fluency disorders, and offered recommendations for improvement. This article re-evaluates the level of support available for some popular approaches to stuttering therapy and questions the relative value placed on some types of programs endorsed by the forum.…

This is a review of the contingency management literature and current related treatment programs for stuttering in childhood: the Lidcombe Program, Gradual Increase in Length and Complexity of Utterance (GILCU), and Prolongation (PS). Treatment efficacy research has shown these treatments to be effective and efficient for children, but there…