Abstract
Speech fluency is acquired during the course of the child's overall speech-language development and its autonomy is firmly established in early childhood. The child's ability to speak fluently therefore, presupposes “learning” and stands on linguistic and physiological bases. To understand stuttering, we need to understand the whole picture of the stuttering problem from a developmental viewpoint.
There has been a widely and mistakenly accepted stereotype among speech-language clinicians that stuttering is “uncurable”. This idea probably comes from naive observations of many adult stutterers' speech. However, we should not forget that very few of them received necessary help to support their speech fluency development in their early years of stuttering. It is possible to remedy incipient stuttering indirectly and very naturally not by so-called “methods of correcting stuttering” but by the clinical application of play therapy techniques to facilitate the fluent speech that the child concurrently posseses.
This paper presents the issues of the earliest possible treatments of childhood stuttering and discusses the development of speech motor control in both stuttering and normally speaking children from the results of this author's recent research and others' studies.
