Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the controversial topic of stuttering in preschool children and how to evaluate the options for treatment, emphasizing the role of external research evidence. Method: A hypothetical but realistic case study of a 3-year-old boy who stutters is described. Two contrasting approaches to treatment are…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to ascertain if there is an association between stuttering severity and behaviors and the expression of temperament characteristics, including precursors of anxiety. Method: We studied temperament characteristics of a prospectively recruited community cohort of children who stutter (N = 173) at ages 3, 4, and…

As children age, they are less likely to experience spontaneous recovery from stuttering and are likely to develop negative attitudes about talking, necessitating counselling to address these feelings. The current exploratory case study examines children's response to traditional speech therapy to address fluency combined with a programmed message…

Speech disfluency in children can be increased or decreased depending on the type of linguistic task presented to them. In this study, the effect of sentence imitation and sentence modeling on severity of speech disfluencies in preschool children with stuttering is investigated. In this cross-sectional descriptive analytical study, 58 children…

Purpose: To report long-term outcomes of the first 15 preschool children treated with the Lidcombe Program by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who were inexperienced with the program and independent of the program developers. Research questions were: Would the treatment have a similar outcome with inexperienced SLPs compared to outcomes when…

This volume examines the ramifications of individual differences in therapy outcomes for a wide variety of communication disorders. In an era where evidence-based practice is the clinical profession's watchword, each chapter attacks this highly relevant issue from a somewhat different perspective. In some areas of communication disorders,…

Using comparative speech tasks and EMG recordings to assess the potential of EMG biofeedback-assisted relaxation to reduce stuttering, a preschool child was able to reduce larynegeal tension but not without some difficulty. The small effect of the training was in the direction of less stuttering. (Author/CM)

This study of final-consonant repetitions in the speech of a young child supports the notion that some speech disfluencies may result from parental attempts to accelerate phonological development. An analysis of 12 half-hour-long observations over a year is presented and discussed in terms of the home environment. (Author/KM)