Perspectives on Fluency and Fluency Disorders

Coordinator's Corner

Games, D. C. — 2013-05-15T14:00:24-07:00

From the Editor

Donaher, J. — 2013-05-15T14:00:24-07:00

Emotion Word Use by Adolescents Who Stutter: An Exploratory Study

Richels, C. G., Rogge, J. — 2013-05-15T14:00:24-07:00

Purpose: Deficits in the ability to use emotion vocabulary may result in difficulties for adolescents who stutter (AWS) and may contribute to disfluencies and stuttering. In this project, we aimed to describe the emotion words used during conversational speech by AWS.

Methods: Participants were 26 AWS between the ages of 12 years, 5 months and 15 years, 11 months-old (n=4 females, n=22 males). We drew personal narrative samples from the UCLASS database. We used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to analyze data samples for numbers of emotion words.

Results: Results indicated that the AWS produced significantly higher numbers of emotion words with a positive valence. AWS tended to use the same few positive emotion words to the near exclusion of words with negative emotion valence.

Conclusion: A lack of diversity in emotion vocabulary may make it difficult for AWS to engage in meaningful discourse about negative aspects of being a person who stutters

Clinical Use of Self-Reports to Measure CBT Program Outcomes

Constantino, D. P., Eger, S., Matthies, M. — 2013-05-15T14:00:24-07:00

In this paper, we explore the treatment effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in a group therapy environment with 11 adults between the ages of 20 and 70 years old. We used the Clinical Use of Self-Report (SSI-4; Riley, 2009) to measure change following a 10-week program. Analysis of self-report measures before and after the program indicated that seven participants showed moderate-to-strong improvement in their overall test scores after completing CBT with increased effect size observed for response to strangers and authority figures.

Initial Counseling With Parents of Preschoolers who Stutter: Enhancing Graduate Students' Skills Using Simulated Caregivers

Gregg, B. A. — 2013-05-15T14:00:24-07:00

No other therapeutic approach to stuttering in general has achieved the consensus of support given to parental involvement in the clinical management of early childhood stuttering. In most cases, this involvement begins with and is based on information received during the initial evaluation. This extremely important initial step in the therapeutic process often can prove difficult for beginning clinicians, especially because of the current landscape of graduate clinical training opportunities. In this manuscript, I will provide a framework for the use of simulated caregivers in the process of enhancing the parent counseling skills during an initial evaluation of graduate students in communication sciences and disorders. Though the field of communication disorders has come late to the idea of using simulated patients, there is a rich and varied literature on this teaching tool in other healthcare fields (e.g., nursing, medicine, psychology). What follows is a review of: (a) the factors affecting graduate training in fluency, (b) the need for better training in parent counseling during the preliminary stages of working with preschool CWS, and (c) a possible framework for this incorporating this training in a tightly-controlled clinical opportunity.