Treating stuttering in young children: Predicting treatment time in the lidcombe program

It is known that children may recover from stuttering without formal treatm ent during the First years after onset. Consequently, the timing of profess ional, early stuttering intervention is a pressing issue in speech-language pathology. This report presents data pertinent to this issue For 261 presc hool-age children who received the Lidcombe Program of early stuttering int ervention. OF these children, 250 completed the program and were considered by their clinicians to have been treated successfully For the children who were treated successfully logistical regression analyses were used to dete rmine whether age, gender, period from onset to treatment, and stuttering s everity related systematically to the time required for treatment. The pres ent data confirmed previous reports that a median of 11 clinic visits was r equired to achieve zero or near-zero stuttering with the Lidcombe Program. Results were also consistent with a preliminary report of 14 children (C. W . Starkweather & S. R. Gottwald, 1993) showing a significant relation betwe en stuttering severity and the time needed for treatment, with children wit h more severe stuttering requiring longer treatment times than children wit h less severe stuttering. However, results did not associate either increas ing age or increased onset-to-treatment intervals with longer treatment tim es. This Finding is not consistent with the Starkweather and Gottwald repor t, which linked advancing age with longer treatment rime. In Fact, the pres ent data suggest that, For a short period after stuttering onset in the pre school years, a short delay in treatment does not appear to increase treatm ent time. An important caveat to these data is that they cannot be generali zed to late childhood or early adolescence. The present findings are discus sed in relation to natural recovery from stuttering.