Stuttering:

Some children and adults stutter, which means they may involuntarily repeat sounds, syllables, words or phrases. A speech pathologist treats stuttering by teaching the client a variety of techniques to monitor their speech and speak more smoothly.

Many children go through a period of disfluency as a normal part of speech and language development. A speech pathologist is responsible for determining if a child with disfluency is likely to become a stutterer. If so, they can begin a paediatric (children’s) fluency program. This process involves a psychological approach of praising smooth speech, reinforcing this behaviour and identifying disfluent speech by saying things like “that was a bit bumpy, let’s try that again”.