Fluency & Voice Therapy
You likely remember the kid in your elementary class who had a stutter. You might even remember how the other kids reacted—it may have been unconformable in the best cases and outright mean in others.
Often, people are unsure about how to respond when talking to people who stutter or have other uncommon speech patterns. They might look away during moments of stuttering, interrupt, fill in words, or simply not talk to a person who stutters.
You don’t want that to happen to your child. You want him or her to be treated kindly and just like everyone else. We can help.
Our Fluency & Voice Therapy can bring relief your child stutters, repeats certain sounds or words, or otherwise has to put forth the effort to speak smoothly.
What is Fluency & Voice Therapy?
Fluency is the part of speech that refers to continuity, smoothness, rate, and effort. You can improve fluency through training.
Our unique approach involves addressing the underlying fluency issues.
Traditional speech therapy strategies include helping your child to learn to create a state of calm focused attention and to self-regulate. Research with athletes revealed that those who localized stress in their shoulders, neck and voice box often had problems with stuttering when excited or upset. With that in mind, we work with them to overcome the reflexes that may be impeding the flow of speech. Or we often use breathing exercises to create awareness of the role breathing plays in speech patterns.
We’ll work through a few behavior modifications steps to facilitate fluent speech at whatever level is attainable, then we’ll slowly increase your child’s ability and frequency to use fluent speech in more life situations.
We also use listening processing training as we have discovered through testing that individuals with fluency problems usually have weaknesses in sequencing and timing when listening to themselves. Most people listen to themselves using one conduction via their skull. If this pathway has not been adequately utilized for self-monitoring, disrupting sequencing and timing of speech with self- monitoring resulting in stuttering behavior.
What Causes Fluency & Voice Issues?
We don’t know the exact cause. Recent studies suggest that genetics plays a role in the fluency and voice issues, but, for example, not everyone who is predisposed to stutter will do so. Frequently young children who stutter are usually going through grow cycles where one area of development is stronger than another. Assisting the child by supporting the weaker area to develop often improves their speech. Assessing and treating underlying areas of weaknesses in listening, language and processing skills can often improve the ability to speak more fluently.
How Are Fluency & Voice Issues Evaluated?
Fluency issues may range from repeating a sound, word or phrase, prolonging a sound, or blocking sounds or words from coming out. There might be a physical reaction – like body tension or a facial grimace. For the most part, fluency issues are easy to detect. But, only a certified speech-language pathologist can tell for sure.
Together, we can discover the best way to help your child. Get in touch today.
Find Your Miracle At CTS Dallas
We are on the cutting edge of speech and language therapy and have been for decades. Our founder, Jane Shook, is world-renowned for her innovative and highly effective approach to treatment.
Jane has developed cross-disciplinary treatments that combine approaches gleaned from traditional speech therapy as well as other arenas to create postural support, achieve calm focused attention and generalization of communication with movement activities. She collaborates closely with like-minded practitioners in occupational therapy, functional neurology, kinesiology, psychology, biomedical treatment, holistic functional dentistry and developmental optometry.
the best approaches from speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physical therapy. Her strategies also include elements of psychology, social work, art therapy, biomedical treatment, functional neurology, and developmental optometry.
At CTS Dallas, we adhere to Jane’s credo that a wise teacher makes learning fun. Our therapists are among the most competent, compassionate, and dedicated in the country.