Stuttering: considerations in the evaluation of treatment.

Stutterers come for help because their disorder of speech is a nuisance that impedes their ability to communicate and generates unpleasant affects when they contemplate doing what normal speakers accomplish easily. Successful treatment should enable them to speak normally and be able to use this speech to interact with their environment in the same way that normal speakers do, and be as confident or as anxious as normal speakers find themselves as the speaking situation varies. In any treatment programme therefore there are three problems. Firstly, to establish criteria that distinguish between stuttering and normal speech, secondly, to be able to measure the severity of the disorder and the subsequent progress towards normality and thirdly, to be able to evaluate empirically the relation of the final result to normal speech. This paper is addressed to these problems.