What tactics do you use?
Hi everyone! I am an SLP undergrad student. We recently learned about things you can do to control your stutter such as singing, talking on a beat, “echoing” someone, etc. Do you use any of these tactics? Do you use any different tactics that help control your stutter? Thank you for your time!
Hahaha!
Happy to hear that creativity does not stop!
It depends on the goal of the therapy and on the person who stutters.
Those activities can be great to build confidence and accept the stutter. For me, the technique that helped me was to find my fears, and try to address them progressively
My new technique, is, as a hobby, to work with People who stutter on public speaking and to emphasise on emotion and expressivity
No, your clients will not want to sing or speak on a beat. They don’t want to replace one unusual way of speaking with another way of speaking. Chronic adolescent and adult stuttering is a specialist area for effective treatment. Do some research to find out who specialises in chronic adult stuttering in your region and has a history of getting good results for their clients and refer your client there. Stick with trying to help younger stuttering clients (2 – 6 years old). You are likely to have more success there sorry to say. Adult stuttering treatment is a hard game and sometimes better suited to psychologists with speech treatment skills then SLPs with no experience in treating the psychological side of stuttering. The risk you take is taking on a client and not being able to help him/her and them leaving believing that speech therapy cannot help them when it can.
I recently learned that they teach children to tap on their legs or on their hands, while creating secondaries! There is also a therapy where you sing your words. Well, if stuttering wasn’t tough enough for people to understand, singing while talking will only add to the making fun of us. Try to stick as close as possible to “normal” speech. Maybe I would have used the echoing when saying my vows, but my “tactics” are the same tactics as great speakers and theatre artists: pausing, volume and pitch, body language, etc. That helped me a lot in my teaching job as well. Just don’t add any more secundaries that the person needs to get rid of later.
Stay safe and keep them talking.
Anita
Some of these special conditions help my fluency at times, and others don’t. In the past I found that auditory feedback devices were often helpful in inducing fluency or at least reducing disfluency (enhancement of vocal tone, delayed auditory feedback, frequency altered feedback, masking). For years I used a DAF device attached to a landline telephone, and this helped very much to improve my speech on the phone.
Once I experienced six weeks of great fluency with an ear-level device that enhanced internal vocal tone, but eventually the effect on my fluency wore off.
I find that I can usually speak or chant fluently when in unison with someone else. Chanting alone does not for me guarantee fluency. But with the unison assistance of someone else, I can usually maintain excellent fluency in this special situation.
Thank you for this interesting question!
But it’s quite rare for me to use such special conditions to enhance fluency. It’s not a regular everyday practice of mine.
Interesting question!
Long ago when I decided to adopt all sort of strategies to my stammer I realized they were shortlived; only worked for a while.
Probably I’m not the kind of person with patience to wait long enough for the strategies to really work. I realized the strategy that could work best and its still working for me is overcoming the fear of stammering. Once I do not fear to stammer and I’m not affected by the negative feelings associated with stammer I can speak whenever I want to without practising any strategies.
What I have rather done is to improve upon my communication. The toastmasters club has been helpful to me in the past.
Elias.