By Jenny Riley
Happy March, friends! Springtime is right around the corner, and we couldn’t be more excited for it here at Conquer! My name is Jennifer Riley, and I am a speech-language pathologist on the Conquer Therapy team. Today I want to spotlight information about fluency, which is one of the many communication disorders we treat at Conquer.
What is Fluency?
Within the wide realm of speech pathology, I often work with clients who stutter, or want to improve their overall conversational fluency. According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), fluency refers to the “continuity, smoothness, rate, and effort in speech production.” Therefore, a fluency disorder is “an interruption in the flow of speaking that is characterized by atypical rate, rhythm, and dysfluencies (e.g., repetitions of sounds, syllables, words, and phrases; sound prolongations; and blocks), which may also be accompanied by excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerisms” (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association [ASHA], 1993).
Clients with stuttering disorders typically experience a disconnect between the centers of the brain that tell our vocal folds (or “cords”) when to open, and when to phonate, or produce vocalizations. The result of this disconnection can be blocked speech or repetitions of speech, along with other physical presentations of disruptions.
Why Provide Therapy?
We treat fluency disorders at Conquer because they have the potential to impact a person’s ability to communicate. We believe that being an effective communicator is such an important role in fostering the highest quality of life in an individual.
When to Contact a Fluency Therapist?
It may be time to contact our Conquer Therapy team if your child is older than 3 and a half and has produced speech with the dysfluency types mentioned above for more than 6 months, with no improvement of stuttering. Our qualified speech-language pathologists will complete a full evaluation of your child’s current conversational fluency and work with your family to develop goals that improve your child’s daily quality of life.
For more information on how we target fluency, check out our Fluency Program.