Purpose: Research has shown that children who stutter (CWS) demonstrate poor adaptive functioning, or poor functional, social, and psychological skills, when compared to children who do not stutter (CWNS). Previous work has also shown that preschool CWS demonstrate significantly lower effortful control than CWNS. High effortful control, or the ability to inhibit a dominant response, is predictive of high adaptive functioning in children who are exposed to a range of adversities. The purposes of this study were fourfold: (a) to investigate if the differences between preschool CWS and CWNS in effortful control extended to school-aged children; (b) to determine if effortful control could uniquely explain adaptive functioning after controlling for a diagnosis of stuttering; (c) to investigate whether effortful control was more influential to CWS than to CWNS; and (d) to investigate whether effortful control uniquely explained adaptive functioning in CWS after controlling for stuttering frequency. Methods: Effortful control and seven core areas of adaptive functioning were investigated in 46 school-age CWS and 46 CWNS. Eight independent two tailed t-tests were used to assess whether CWS demonstrated lower effortful control than CWNS and lower adaptive functioning than CWNS in seven adaptive functioning areas: communication competence, peer competence, internalizing behaviors, externalizing behaviors, general anxiety, social anxiety, and depression. Correlation and hierarchical regression analyses were used to examine the extent to which each component of adaptive functioning was related to effortful control when controlling for age, intelligence, parent-child relationship, and stuttering v PUBLIC ABSTRACT Children who stutter often experience negative consequences as a result of stuttering, including poor relationships with their peers, higher psychological behavior problems, and lower communication abilities. Research has shown that the better a child can regulate his or her emotions, the better he or she can cope with difficulties. This is particularly compelling as preschool children who stutter have lower regulation abilities than their peers. However, because 75% of preschool children who stutter will recover, it is unknown whether the subgroup of older school-age children who continue to stutter also have lower abilities in regulation. If they do, they may not have the internal regulation abilities needed to cope with stuttering. Moreover the negative side effects of stuttering may not be due to the stuttering itself, but to diminished regulation abilities. This study investigated whether emotional regulation is more important to social, psychological, and communication abilities than stuttering in school-age children. The results showed that emotional regulation was the most important factor to a child developing positive social and psychological skills, even more important than whether the child stuttered, or even the degree of the stuttering. However, the study also showed that quantity of stuttering also aff...

Purpose We previously presented findings from pretherapy solution-focused interviews regarding the therapeutic best hopes of older children who stutter (CWS) and their parents. The current follow-up study explored the same clients' solution-focused reflections 1 year later with respect to their perspectives of what changes had occurred over the course of therapy. Method Seven CWS (11–14 years old) and 12 of their parents, who were interviewed in the original Berquez et al. (2015) study, were interviewed again 1 year after they started therapy. These clients responded to open-ended, solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT)–style questions and rating scales. Their responses were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed to identify what clients noticed had changed over the course of therapy. Result CWS and their parents reported changes spanning social communication abilities, cognitive-emotional skills, and speech management strategies. While these were consistent with their pretherapy best hopes, CWS and their parents identified additional, unexpected gains beyond the scope of what they originally hoped for at the beginning of therapy, including improvements in adaptive coping, academic experience, parent–child interactions, thoughts and feelings about stuttering, and personal growth. Conclusion SFBT can provide speech-language pathologists a framework for facilitating client reflections on positive signs of change that occur over the therapeutic process.

No abstract

No abstract

The results partially corroborate the dual diathesis stressor model. Disfluencies significantly decreased in CWS-R as grammatical abilities (not age) increased. Language development may serve as a protective factor or catalyst for recovery for CWS-R. As grammatical ability grew and the gap between linguistic ability and demand decreased; however, none of the three groups was more likely to produce disfluencies in longer and more complex utterances.

No abstract

Developmental stuttering is a heterogeneous language disorder characterized by persistent speech disruptions, which are generally realized as repetitions, blocks, or prolongations of sounds and syllables (DSM-IV-R, 1994). While previous studies have uncovered ample evidence of deficits in both “higher-level” linguistic planning and “lower-level” motor plan assembly, identifying the relative contribution of the specific factors underlying these deficits has proved difficult. Phrasal prosody represents a point of intersection between linguistic and motoric planning, and therefore a promising direction for stuttering research. In the present study, 12 children who stutter (CWS) and 12 age-matched controls (CWNS) produced sentences varying in length and syntactic complexity. Quantitative measures (F0, duration, and intensity) were calculated for each word, juncture, and utterance. Overall, CWS produced a narrower F0 range across utterance types than did CWNS, while utterance duration did not differ significantly between groups. Within utterances, CWS (but not CWNS) produced a greater degree of pre-boundary lengthening preceding relative clauses in syntactically complex sentences, as well as higher F0 variability at these juncture points. Such differences suggest that for CWS utterance planning is sensitive to syntactic complexity, possibly reflecting either a deficit in syntactic processing or the relative effects of syntactic processing on a strained processing system.

No abstract