>> Craig Coleman: Stuttering is often identified by speech language pathologists as the most difficult area to treat, in terms of SLPs’ reluctance to treat it. It is an area of our field that makes us uncomfortable. Today we will try to talk about why that might be. I think there are several different reasons for that. We will start to demystify it so you feel more comfortable and capable of treating it as you move forward.
Learning Objectives
Some of the things we hope to accomplish today, specifically in these two hours, are to describe the various types of stuttering and the differences between stuttering and disfluency. That is something that we are going to spend a fair amount of time on today. This may seem very basic, but it is not. It is important, because it helps to shape what we do from an assessment and treatment standpoint in therapy with these children. If our definition of stuttering is inaccurate, then how we assess it and treat it will also be inaccurate. Setting that foundational knowledge is very important.
We want to talk about the current theoretical framework of stuttering. We will talk about how we got to this point, the history of how we have viewed stuttering from a theoretical standpoint, and how that history has shaped our terminology now.
We also want to talk about incidence and prevalence information and some basic facts about stuttering to help us identify different types of stuttering and how common it is. For example, certain types of stuttering, like psychogenic stuttering and neurogenic stuttering, are things that we want to talk about, but the prevalence and incidence of those types of stuttering is not nearly as significant as the prevalence and incidence of childhood-onset stuttering. We will spend more time talking about childhood-onset stuttering.
Disclosures
I will be talking about the Overall Assessment of the Speaker’s Experience of Stuttering (OASES) instrument as a way to assess emotions and affective and cognitive responses to stuttering. The OASES is published by Pearson. I do receive royalties from Pearson because I am a co-author of the OASES. I may be talking a bit about using children’s books in therapy and tele-therapy, and I do have an ownership interest in the Virtual Stuttering Center where I do tele-therapy, and in MCSpeech Books, where we sell the children’s books that I co-authored. I am also the current coordinator of ASHA’s SIG 4, which is the special interest group on fluency and fluency disorders.
