Effect of Speech Therapy in Conjunction with Stress Management via Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on Adult Stuttering

Stuttering is a motor disorder that disrupts the fluent and connected speech flow and appears with different severities. As a special childhood phenomenon, it begins in the age range of 6 to 7, which coincides with the development of emotional and social adaptability, when children are most susceptible to this disorder and in some exceptional cases in early childhood at the age range of 2-4. Some people who have stuttered in the early stages of puberty continue to do so well into the adulthood. This disorder is more common among boys than girls in proportion of two to one. In fact, the reasons for stuttering among children are not yet known. However, what is somewhat clear is that it cannot have a single cause. Rather, a cohort of physical, emotional, or social causes often causes it. Many people with stuttering have some neurological discomfort and social inaccuracies. However, it is very difficult to determine whether such mental disorders are the cause of stuttering. In some cases, stuttering may be due to inadequacies and disorders of the nervous system; in other cases, stuttering from childhood may be due to some mild physiological abnormalities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of speech therapy with stress management on reducing the severity of stuttering among individuals over 18 years old in Isfahan-Iran.
This is a two-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study. The population consisted of all people between the age of 18 to 25 years’ old who went to public and private speech therapy clinics in Isfahan in autumn and winter of 2017. Convenience sampling used to recruit 34 participants. The participants were assigned to the experimental and control groups in equal numbers. The experimental group received speech therapy with stress management. The research instrument was The Stuttering Test (SSI4). SSI4 is one of the most important and most reliable stuttering severity measures. This instrument used as a partial description of stuttering and outcome measurement. The inter-reliability of this instrument is 0.93 to 0.98. Riley developed this instrument in 2009, translated, and normed by Tamasebi in Iran. Covariance analysis used to analyze the data through Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 21.
The results showed significant improvement in frequency, duration and physical behavior (p The study showed that speech therapy in conjunction with stress management via cognitive behavioral therapy could improve adult stutter. Thus, the aforementioned method can be used for treating adult stuttering.