Choosing a treatment procedure for early stuttering: issues and future directions

The new responsibility of speech-language pathologists to provide direct, early intervention for stuttering creates a further responsibility for them to choose justifiable treatment procedures for that intervention. This paper has two purposes. The first is to encourage clinicians to evaluate the conceptual and practical aspects of the treatments they use for early stuttering. The second purpose of the paper is to overview available early intervention procedures and consider the advantages, disadvantages, and prominent issues associated with each. The procedures considered are environment manipulation, prolonged speech, and response-contingent stimulation. It is concluded that clinicians have no cause to be satisfied with any currently available early intervention procedure. Further, it is concluded that (a) although anticipatory struggle theories have made a useful contribution to scholarship, their line of theoretical reasoning is questionable for clinical practice; (b) although theoretically sound for the purpose, variants of prolonged speech pose prohibitive conceptual and practical shortcomings if they are used to treat very young stuttering children; (c) despite its disadvantages, response contingent stimulation is the most conceptually and practically justifiable method for early intervention with stuttering.