Intervention with the Lidcombe Program for a School-age Child who Stutters with Selective Mutism

Abstract

This study reports on the progress of a 1-year, 3-month intervention aimed at reducing stuttering symptoms in a second-grade boy whose main complaint was the symptoms of stuttering and whose stuttering problems surfaced after the improvement of selective mutism. There was no apparent decrease in severity rating and frequency of disfluency during therapy situations in the Lidcombe Program with the therapist, but there was a decrease in severity rating in playground situations with the mother. His disfluency occurred more frequently in utterances of three or more clauses than in those of one or two clauses. Furthermore, the final part-word of repetitions occurred only in utterances of three or more clauses.In the future, the linguistic aspect of the study will be examined more closely, and results suggest that the therapy settings should be adjusted to maintain the same level of fluency as in situations with the mother.