The Relationship of Adaptation and Consistency to Improvement in Stuttering Therapy

Abstract

For 33 stutterers of at least average severity, two measures of adaptation and one of consistency were made prior to any therapy at the Iowa Speech Clinic. This study tested the hypothesis that high adaptation and low consistency scores are related to improvement in stuttering therapy. Each measure was correlated with three criteria of improvement (increase in rate of utterance, decrease in frequency of disfluencies, and decrease in judged severity) over a year’s continuous therapy. The hypothesis received partial support, though correlations were too small to be of any clinical significance. One need in future work is to improve the reliability of measurement.