The effect of maternal rate reduction on the stuttering, speech rates and linguistic productions of children who stutter: Evidence from individual dyads

Coordinated interpersonal timing in the conversations of children who stutter and their mothers and fathers

“…In particular, present findings serve to move us away from the notion that the parents of children who stutter "talk too fast," or "interrupt too much," and toward an appreciation of how we might exploit the normal phenomenon of mutual accommodation in parent-child conversations as a way to facilitate the child's fluent speech production. That is, taken together with the observation that parental use of shorter and slower utterances (turns and vocalizations), and longer switching pauses can be fluency facilitating for some children who stutter (e.g., Bernstein Ratner, 1992; Guitar et al, 1992;Zebrowski et al, 1996), findings from this study provide support for stuttering therapy approaches for children that emphasize parent manipulation and modeling of temporal characteristics of parent-child interaction. In addition, these findings lend insight into why such approaches might be efficacious.…”

“…One way to begin to address this question is through the experimental manipulation of parent speaking rate, using the same or similar methods employed in previous work (e.g., Guitar & Marchinkoski, 2001;Zebrowski et al, 1996). Besides the lagged CIT coefficients themselves, additional dependent variables might include a measure of global or overall speaking rate derived from AVTA analysis (see Feldstein, 1998) as well as standard measures of disfluency across an interaction or within utterances.…”

“…As a way to assess the validity of this practice, several investigators examined the effects of training parents to slow their speech rate, increase the duration of their switching pauses, and use shorter, simpler utterances when talking with their children who stutter (e.g., Guitar & Marchinkoski, 2001;Bernstein Ratner, 1992;Stephenson-Opsal & Bernstein Ratner, 1988;Zebrowski, Weiss, Savelkoul, & Hammer, 1996). The most consistent finding in this work was that for the most part, parents can reduce their speaking rate following instruction, and for some children who stutter, a slowed parent speech rate leads to decreased stuttering, even if the child does not slow his or her speaking rate.…”

Effects of the Lidcombe Program and Parent-Child Interaction Therapy on Stuttering Reduction in Preschool Children

“…Moreover, the difference in achieving results from the programs is due to whether parents really have the ability to maintain their behavioral changes. Another issue is that since direct and indirect intervention programs claim to be flexible depending on the children’s conditions and their family, it could be that they actually have similar effects on children’s speech fluency [24, 57]. …”

Slow speech rate effects on stuttering preschoolers with disordered phonology

“…When adults speak slower with normally fluent preschoolers, speech rate ''entrainment'' or ''alignment'' may occur, whereby the child speaks slower along with the adult (Guitar & Marchinkoski, 2001;Torrington Eaton & Bernstein Ratner, 2013). Most preschoolers who stutter do not show speech rate alignment, and yet their fluency is facilitated when an adult interlocutor slows his/her rate (Zebrowski, Weiss, Savelkoul, & Hammer, 1996). When measuring preschoolers' articulation rate or fluent speech rate in phones per second, children with phonological disorders speak slower than their peers with normal phonology (Flipsen, 2002(Flipsen, , 2003, and children who stutter speak slower than their peers with normal fluency (Dailey Hall, Amir, & Yairi, 1999).…”