Stuttering severity, psychosocial impact and lexical diversity as predictors of outcome for treatment of stuttering

Objective: This study assessed factors that predicted therapy outcome for children and adolescents who stuttered after attendance at an intensive therapy course. The factors examined were stuttering severity, lexical diversity measured by Type Token Ratio, and psychosocial impact of stuttering on the child's life.

Design: Fifty-four children who stuttered (CWS) participated in the study. The hypotheses were: (1) CWS with high initial stuttering severity would be more likely to persist than those with low initial severity; (2) lexical diversity before treatment should be related to therapy outcome; (3) psychosocial factors would affect therapy outcome. The predictions were assessed by linear and logistic regression analyses.

Results: Initial stuttering severity was the only significant predictor for stuttering severity after therapy. However, psychosocial impact correlated with improvement in fluency, and lexical diversity correlated with therapy outcome.

Conclusions: Only initial stuttering severity was a significant predictor of therapy outcome after an intensive therapy intervention. This is in agreement with the study of Howell and Davis (2011).

Educational objectives: Readers will get an overview of the literature on risk factors that are considered to predict therapy outcomes for CWS. They will be able to (a) identify what variable represent potential risk factors, (b) describe the psychosocial impact of stuttering, (c) explain how lexical diversity is measured, and (d) describe different assessment instruments used to decide on the outcome of therapy.