The Articulation program focuses on the development of the discrimination skills necessary to monitor speech production and the placement skills for articulation. Goals for children vary dependent on need. The audiology clinic is open throughout the summer to provide audiological evaluations and central auditory processing evaluations. Services are also offered in hearing aid fitting and repair. The University Clinic offers an intensive summer program for children who are disfluent with less intensive services available for adults upon request.
Therapeutic approaches differ for adults and children who are disfluent.
The orientation for young children emphasizes family participation in modifying the environment to promote easy, relaxed, and effortless speech production. Therapy for school-age children may focus more on learning specific techniques for enhancing fluency and exploring feelings related to communication. The intensive summer program utilizes a combination of individual and group therapy. Current research indicates that young children who are stuttering pass through a critical period in which they may regain their normal fluency and not be troubled by their disfluencies again. It is often difficult to determine whether a child is stuttering or undergoing a period of disfluency related to their normal development in physical, emotional, or social areas.