Positive Messages And Traditional Therapy For Three Children With Persistent Stuttering

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 to modify negative attitudes about talking. A standard narration, saved to a compact disk (CD), was used as a counselling experience for children, ages 6, 7, and 10;11 years, recruited from a university clinic predominantly serving African American children. A one-tailed Mann-Whitney U-test was performed to examine differences in stuttering across three pretreatment sessions to treatment results from two experimental sessions. The analysis indicated that participants who completed the two treatment sessions stuttered significantly less during the sessions that included the CD, with a moderate clinical effect size as indicated by r, (Mdn = 9), U = 12, p ≤ .05, r = .53. For 2 of 3 participants who completed post-testing with the Stuttering Severity Instrument-3 (SSI-3), testing indicated a reduction in overall scores and stuttering severity (Riley, 1994). There is a need for future studies to examine the content of motivational messages as components of therapy to address stuttering.