A University of Iowa faculty member has won funding from the National Institutes of Health to introduce a new approach to promote confidence in speaking for elementary-school students who stutter. 

Naomi Rodgers, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, will design and lead the evaluation of the approach, called stutter-affirming therapy. Stutter-affirming therapy differs from more traditional approaches focused on improving speech fluency because it prioritizes students’ comfort, confidence, and participation in communication, rather than attempts to reduce or eliminate stuttering. 

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental condition that can involve repetitions, prolongations, or interruptions in speech. Research shows that many of the psychosocial difficulties people who stutter experience stem from social reactions and communication environments that prioritize fluency. 

“Personally, as someone who stutters, I trudged through many years of ineffective fluency-focused therapy growing up, as do many other young people who stutter,” Rodgers says. 

Rodgers will partner with speech-language pathologists and people who stutter to adapt stutter-affirming therapy for use in schools — the setting where most children who stutter receive speech-therapy services. She then will train the school-based, speech-language pathologists to put the approach into practice. Rodgers will evaluate the therapy’s effectiveness based on students’ self-reports of their confidence with speaking, teachers’ reports of classroom participation, and objective measures of children’s stuttering patterns. 

Rodgers’ team will conduct surveys and interviews with speech therapists, student participants, their parents, and teachers after they participate in the study to understand what helps or hinders using the approach successfully in the schools. 

“Through this project, I hope to help make speech therapy a more supportive and empowering experience for kids who stutter, encouraging them to communicate freely, participate more, and feel OK about stuttering,” Rodgers says. 

The five-year award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders is for $891,836.