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Did you know that around 20% of preschoolers stutter at some point? Most of them establish fluent speech without any special help, but about 20-25% of them continue to stutter throughout their lives.
I am an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist serving Scottsdale and the greater Phoenix area. I specialize in treating individuals who stutter across the life span and am a Board Certified Specialist in fluency disorders. Seeing your toddler or preschooler begin to stutter can be a scary experience for a parent. While some children will naturally "outgrow" early childhood disfluency, we are not able to predict which children might continue to be persistent stutterers. Risk factors such as how old the child is when he began to stutter, how long he has been stuttering, and being a boy can all influence the outcome. There is much that can be done to reverse stuttering in the early years by helping parents learn tools for facilitating fluency and for minimizing fluency disruptors. Therapy for school-aged children, including those in the early grades, is direct and usually involves dealing with the uncomfortable feelings about talking and stuttering that develop in addition to the stuttered speech itself. Therapy for adults, including those of retirement age, usually focuses on identifying and addressing quality of life issues and/or specific communication goals, such as managing a job interview, improving social communication, or giving a presentation.
Cluttering is another fluency disorder that can make speech difficult. People who clutter seem to talk too fast. They sometimes "slur" their words, and they may have too many pauses or hesitations in their speech. They may start a sentence three or more different ways before they finally stick it out to the end. Their speech can be hard to understand or to follow even though they are able to produce all the speech sounds accurately. Most people who clutter also stutter, but not all. Therapy for cluttering involves identifying the factors that interfere with speech and learning new patterns.
I am also dedicated to working with school-aged children with language-based learning disorders such as Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia, and Auditory Processing Disorders (APD) as well as related disorders such as ADD/ADHD. Reading and writing use the same base knowledge of word learning, syntax, and narrative as speaking and listening. Often, children who struggle with reading and writing were slow to start talking or had speech that was hard to understand. Working with both modalities--oral and written language--improves the basic language system and results in more fluent oral reading, better comprehension, more interesting conversations, and better organized stories and reports. Therapy involves all of these modalities to address difficulties with phonological awareness, spelling, sentence structure, and story organization.
In addition to providing evaluations and therapy in my private practice, I also conduct Independent Educational Evaluations. I am a frequent presenter at national and state conferences and conventions as well as school districts, private practices, and mothers' groups! Please contact me for more information about these services.
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