The Role of Mother Communication Styles in Treatment of Stuttering in Children

Abstract

Stuttering is decribed as a disorder of fluency and characterized by part-word, whole-word and phrase repetitions; interjections; pauses; and prolonged. Studies done about communication patterns of parent and child generally focus on the negative of positive nature of the statements, such as verbal aggression, silents, and interruptions more excessively than the parents of non stutters; and at the same time, parents became a part of the therapy proccesses of stuttering.The communication patterns used between Albanian mothers and her stuttering child and her normally fluent child were investigated. A total of 20 mother-stuttering child pairs and 20 mother-nonstuttering child pairs participated in the preswent study. All mother child pairs were administered a structured game to facilitate spontaneous speech. Comments, questions, critical statement, no response and interruptions were studied as negative statements. Verbal praise and verbal acknowledgments were accepted as a possitive statement.Interaction times and total amount of words were also measured.A significant different was found between both mother and child groups only in the total words used. No significant differences were found for any other communication styles.These findings suggest that the communication behaviour of mother of stuttering children is not different from that of the mothers of nonstutters.