Speech Therapists Help Children Overcome Stuttering Early

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- That feeling of holding yourself back from finishing the sentence of a person who stutters -- we've all been there. On this National Stuttering Awareness Week, WCCO Radio is doing a five-part series on the communication disorder that affects 70 million people worldwide, three million here in the U.S. alone. Here's Al Schoch with Part 4 of "Speech Interrupted: The Science of Stuttering."

The child sits in a chair at the Children's Therapy Center in Eagan. Across the table is their speech therapist, sitting down. They look each other in the eye, between them on a table is a round plastic object with a button on top. The child speaks, but with a quiet but pronounced stutter.

"But I want to go to the grocery story," he says with a stutter.

The speech therapist slams the object, a light goes on and a buzzer goes off.

"Oops, busted! That's bumpy talk," she says.

And that's what speech therapist Jessica Jordan calls "Speech Cops," one of the games she plays to help children overcome speech problems.

"Usually the family is more stressed out about it than the child is. They're seeing lots of repetitions in their speech, difficulty speaking," Jordan said. "The parents are feeling, like, 'Whoa, this is really different. I don't hear any other children doing this.'"

Tendencies to stutter begin to appear between the ages of 2 and 4. That's when child's vocabulary is growing and their pace of life quickens, increasing demands on communication skills.

"If the child is stuttering, they know that speech is hard, and the people around them are reacting in a way that is concerning, like, making faces, acting tense, or having them stop and say things over again, but not talking about what's happening," Jordan said. "Kids sense that something is wrong."

Following an evaluation, there's an audio tape of a language sample to asses the child's speech. The therapists look for disfluencies, such as interjections, prolongation of sounds and repetition of syllables. Families are encouraged to have environmental changes at home to help their children away from therapists. At the clinic, Jordan encourages fluency shaping, using a strategy called "Easy Starts."

"You stretch out the first word and the rest of the phrase stays the same. If you were able to say maybe a three-word phrase: 'I have milk.' It doesn't draw a lot of attention to itself, but it gives you that extra time, that easy onset to start your phrase," Jordan said.

The therapist and child work up through the hierarchy, finally reaching a conversational or story-telling level by working on fluency-shaping strategies.

A major concern of parents is how their children react to teasing. The Stuttering Foundation made a video where kids teach the lesson:

"Our job is to teach being effective communicators and confident communicators, so that kids are more likely to tease them don't see that as a weakness," said Jordan.

Having fun while polishing language skills helps kids become more fluent, increasing confidence in public settings. What can be a problem is when parents want immediate results.

"The more pressure you put on it, the more difficult it can be to be fluent," Jordan said. "You just take it as it comes, and know that you're doing things in due course."

Early intervention typically gets children through early phases of development, according to Jordan. Those who can't get past stuttering learn strategies to become effective communicators while managing what may become a lifelong problem.