English-only treatment of bilingual speakers who stutter: Generalization of treatment effects from English to Mandarin

Abstract

Purpose: Speech language pathologists often do not speak the dominant language of their clients and so the language of treatment is an important consideration. This research investigated whether stuttering treatment delivered in English resulted in reductions in stuttering in English and Mandarin bilingual Singaporean speakers.

Method: Participants were 19 English-Mandarin bilinguals who stuttered. They received a speech re-structuring intensive program (IP) delivered in English only. Three 10-minute conversations in English and Mandarin, sampled at pre-treatment, immediately post IP, 4 weeks post IP and 12 weeks post IP, were analysed by two English-Mandarin bilingual clinicians for percentage of syllables stuttered (%SS).

Result: After English-only treatment, stuttering reductions were found to generalize to Mandarin. Stuttering reductions were significantly higher in English compared to Mandarin at 4 weeks post-IP, but there was no significant difference in the stuttering reductions between languages at the end of IP and at 12 weeks post-IP. Mean %SS scores for English and Mandarin were comparable with the outcome data reported for a similar intensive speech-restructuring program for monolingual English-speaking adults.

Conclusion: The results of this study show that stuttering reductions can be achieved in two languages following treatment in one language only. Future research in this area is proposed.

Keywords::

• Bilingual
• stuttering
• treatment generalization

Acknowledgements

We thank the staff at the Speech Therapy Department, Singapore General Hospital, for helping with the recruitment of participants and the collection of data, Mark Lu, who digitized all the speech samples, and Noah Tan and Cherine Graham for rating the speech samples. We also thank those who kindly volunteered to participate in the study.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

This research was supported by grants from the National Medical Research Council (NMRC/ 0983/2005), Singapore and the Postgraduate Research Support Scheme (2005–2006), The University of Sydney, Australia.