by GalWave

Created on: May 29, 2008   Last Updated: May 30, 2008

This letter will shed some light on:

Could voice therapy be a remedy for stuttering!?!

It has been long known, that stuttering, especially in severe cases with blocks, stops and interjections, could produce a real voice disorder as a post effect.

In most of these cases of severe stuttering, while the patient is blocking his speech we can see how much pressure is building below the closed vocal cords until they finally open for that interjection of speech production, causing the upper circulatory neck veins to be full of blood and well shown and causing a severe friction effect on the vocal cords themselves.

Thus, there is not much surprise in the clinical connection between stuttering and a secondary voice disorders. The voice of these stutterers is harsh, choppy, and very distinct.

Voice therapy might cure stuttering - really?

Speech pathologists who treated many stutterers throughout the years have seen numerous times that by treating the secondary voice disorder not only voice quality is improved but surprisingly enough the stuttering has become less severe and in some cases is gone completely!
This is actually not so surprising...Any speech pathologist that has the speciality to treat stuttering will tell you that one of the best remedies clinically proven is to change the output pattern of the patient speech. Since, voice therapy is doing just that...it may as well be a wonderful remedy for severe stuttering.

What would be the clinical procedure?

In the evaluation process I see many stutterers with a secondary voice disorder, while testing the voice and speech production of these patients I will decide which of the disorders to tackle first and which technique to use...Most probably if the patient's voice is harsh and choppy I will choose to treat him with a technique that will try to solve both disorders or rather, to do voice therapy that will eliminate the vocal abuse secondary to his fluency disorder and improve his vocal production while working against his disfluency behaviors by changing the speech production process all together.

What exactly do we do in voice therapy against stuttering?

There are typically a couple of very good techniques to choose from nowadays, while any voice therapy technique that will work to change the breath support pattern of the patient while advocating vocal cords relaxation physiotherapy is good and will have positive results on both the stuttering disorder as well as on the secondary voice hoarsens, I would much prefer

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