Times are Changing: Temporal Features of Speech to Children Who Stutter

Abstract

AbstractPurpose: Treatments for stuttering often offer advice that parents modify temporal features of speech during conversational interaction to assist the child who stutters (CWS) and entrain them to a less demanding model of speech. Advice includes but is not limited to increasing turn-taking/response-time latencies (RTL), reducing interruptions, and slowing adult speech. We looked specifically at RTL and parental speech rate as well as adherence to advice in a longitudinal data set that included behaviors before and after advice were made specifically to alter speech behaviors. Method: We used data from one-year follow-up recordings (N=12 CWS persistent; 18 CWS recovered) of the Illinois International Stuttering Research Project (IISRP) at FluencyBank, using CLAN software with audio linkage to PRAAT (Lieshout, 2003). Results: Overall, mothers of CWS-P increased their response time latency and decreased their speech rate more than mothers of CWS-R a year following intake. Both children who persisted and recovered decreased their weighted stuttering-like disfluency score by the year follow-up. Conclusions: This is a retrospective, observational study, and caution must be used in interpreting our findings. Current results continue not to add evidentiary support that parental adjustments in temporal parameters of speech impact short or long-term fluency in CWS. The results of the study led us to re-evaluate the widely circulated notions that parental speech behaviors may influence the persistence of stuttering. We discuss how these findings can guide clinical decision making at the counselling level.