This article is a written transcript of the course, “Fluency Treatment in Adults”, presented by Rodney Gabel on May 16, 2011.
Communication access realtime translation (cart) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be totally verbatim. The consumer should check with the moderator for any clarifications of the material.
>> Amy Natho: I'd like to welcome everybody to the SpeechPathlogy.com E-learning Expert Seminar entitled, “Fluency Treatment in Adults.” We're very pleased to have Dr. Rodney Gabel back with us today. Rodney Gabel is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Bowling Green State University. He teaches courses and conducts research on stuttering. Dr. Gabel has presented papers at national conventions and international conventions and has published research articles, all dealing with stuttering and other fluency disorders. So welcome, Rodney. We're so glad to have you.
>> Rodney Gabel: Thank you very much for having me. Well, I'm happy to be here, and for those who attended the last talk, you would know that I am a person who stutters as well. Today what I would like to talk about is just basics in fluency treatment in adults. I am going to talk about a multi-faceted approach to treatment, and also a bit about some work and some programs and share some data that we have. So we'll get moving right along. It is going to be a very full agenda today.
Bottom Line
The bottom line for why we talk about a multi-faceted approach is that stuttering is a very multifaceted or multifactorial problem. We know that certainly there are some physiological underpinnings to the problem. We know it is most likely genetic in nature. We know that even now, we have some pretty good evidence of actual genetic materials, chromosomes and genes and things such as that that seem to be related to stuttering and its onset. We know that there is most likely a disruption in the programming for speech, and this disruption is most likely happening at a central neurological level, in areas of the brain involved in motor planning. We also know that, especially with adolescents and adults, there is the impact of learning and reacting to stuttering. The idea of being a person who stutters for many, many years can lead to some real difficulties with the problem and make it a much more complex disorder than just those easy kinds of disfluency that we see in children. And certainly we know that emotional states and reactions to the problem, which are also learned, can lead to some real difficulties.
