Description

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The present study aimed to investigate the efficacy of prolonged speech and pause and talk treatment techniques in Kannada-speaking school-age CWS. A 'modified pretest and posttest treatment design' was used in the present study. Through a purposive sampling procedure, 30 Kannada-speaking school-age (6 to 12 years) CWS were recruited for the present study. A detailed pre-treatment assessment was carried out prior to treatment initiation. Fifteen children were quasi-randomly allocated to each treatment group based on the severity of stuttering. Group I and group II children were treated using PS and PT treatment (Hegde, 2006) programs, respectively. Children were discharged once they reached 97% fluency, and maintained a severity rating of 1 or 2 for two to three sessions. After the immediate post-treatment assessment, children were followed up at one month and three months to assess the maintenance of the achieved fluency skills. Out of 34, 30 children completed the treatment program along with two follow-up assessments. Two spontaneous speech samples (clinician-child interaction & child-narrative speech) were collected at each within and extra-clinic speaking situations across time points. Each audio-video recorded speech sample lasted for 10 minutes. A 350-syllable speech sample was orthographically transcribed and subjected to further analysis. The present study employed the following outcome variables: percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS), stuttering severity rating (SSR), rate of speech in syllables per minute (SPM), speech naturalness rating (NAT), physical concomitants (PCC), Communication Attitude Test in Kannada (CAT-K), Speech Situation Checklist in Kannada (SSC-ER-K) and the total number of sessions.