A simple and effective treatment for stuttering: Speech practice without audience

Abstract

On the assumption that stuttering is essentially acquired behavior, it has been concluded that speech-related anticipatory anxiety as a major cause of stuttering accounts for virtually all apparently-different aspects of stuttering on the behavioral level. Stutterers' linguistic competence is unimpaired, although their speech production is characterized as "disfluent". Yet, such disfluency is dramatically reduced when such people speak in anxiety-free no-audience conditions. Furthermore, our pilot study of oral reading in Japanese indicates that a stutterer can easily replace stuttering events with a common interjection, "eh", and make oral reading sound natural and fluent. Given these facts, we propose the Overlearning Fluency when Alone (OFA) treatment, consisting of two distinct but overlapping steps: (1) Overlearning of fluency in a no-audience condition, and (2) Use of an interjection, "eh", as a starter when a stuttering event is anticipated. It remains to be demonstrated that this is a truly simple and effective treatment for "one of mankind's most baffling afflictions".