The journal article I chose to review is “The Lidcombe Program and Child Language

Development: Long-Term Assessment.” The purpose of this study was to understand the

processes behind the Lidcombe Program treatment effectiveness. The objective was to further

the investigation of the relationship between reduced stuttering in children effectively treated

with the Lidcombe Program with restricted language development. The Lidcombe Program is a

prominent evidence-based early intervention and behavioral treatment for stuttering. The goal

of the Lidcombe program is to reduce or completely get rid of stuttering. It involves parents

giving verbal contingencies to their children with the guidance of an SLP. In stage one, as the

stuttering gradually goes away so do the verbal contingencies and in stage two, when stuttering

is consistently low, the SLP monitors the speech of the child until the stuttering is completely

absent or almost completely absent for at least one year, 12 months. The Lidcombe Program

offers the most robust evidence base backing its clinical outcomes for clinicians looking to help

children who stutter. This therapy is used by clinicians to minimize stuttering during a crucial

stage of language development.

Technique/Design

Three assessments were used, a pre-randomization where the child has been stuttering

for at least six months, 9-months post-randomization where the children had completed the

first stage of the Lidcombe Program, and finally, 18-months post-randomization where the

children were in maintenance (stage two) of the Lidcombe Program. During the pre-

randomization, the children went through language testing with the Clinical Evaluation of

Language Fundamentals (CLEF-P2). For the nine and 18 month randomizations, parents were
given equipment and instructions for making a ten-minute audio recording of conversational

speech. The guidelines encouraged the parents to have natural conversation and wanted to

stay clear from things like singing or other rehearsed speech and to keep background noise to a

minimum. A real time count with the use of an electronic counter was used to count the

number of spoken syllables as well as the number of syllables that stutter briefly. All utterances

(child and parent) were transcribed word for word and checked two times to make sure they

were accurate. The guidelines used for this came from Systematic Analysis of Language

Transcripts (SALT).

Population

The population consisted of eleven children. It was a randomized controlled trial that

had two parts: standard individual LP and group LP. Nine boys and two girls had been

randomized to the standard LP part. They ranged in ages of three years zero months and five

years eleven months at the start of the trial. They all had to have been stuttering for more than

six months without receiving any previous therapy.

Results

Pre-trial randomization, the mean of the percent of syllables stuttered (%SS) was 4.2%,

at nine months post-randomization it was 0.8 and at 18 months post-randomization it was 0.7.

The children showed significant decreases in stuttering after the first stage of the Lidcombe

Program treatment. The mean length of utterance (MLU) in morphemes, pre-randomization

was 4.1, nine months post-randomization 4.3, and it was 4.8 at 18 months post-randomization.
The number of different words (NDW) were 147.2 at pre-randomization, 161.7 at the nine-

month post-randomization, and 184.8 at the final 18-month post-randomization. The data from

the study's participants offer no evidence that effective stuttering therapy was linked to

restricted language development. In fact, the findings indicate a statistically significant decrease

in %SS following therapy but no statistically significant decrease in MLU or NDW throughout an

18-month pre- to post-randomization period.

Conclusions

This study shows that reducing stuttering in children effectively treated with the

Lidcombe Program are not linked to restricted language development. It appears that this area

of study has no chance of revealing the disorder's nature or informing later Lidcombe Program

treatment development. The focus of the investigation into the processes underlying this

effective treatment must shift to other areas.

Areas Needing Further Study

Although testing a larger pool of participants would not be necessary this time, there

are other things to do differently next time as well. One of the limitations faced was that there

was no control group that was studied. Another being that the children were age matched plus

or minus six months to the previous study done but not on any other variables such as gender,

first language status and parent education level. Along with those, there is the cultural and

linguistic difference between the sample of Australians and the normative data from US

children.
Evaluation

I think this article did exactly what it wanted to do as well as it could with the population

they had. They collected plenty of more data that supported that reducing stuttering in children

effectively treated with the Lidcombe Program are not linked to restricted language

development. They thoroughly explained what the Lidcombe Program is and how the trial was

run and measured. All the data was clear and logical. Overall, this article was very well written

and easy to understand and navigate.

References

Imeson, J., Lowe, R., Onslow, M., Munro, N., Heard, R., O’Brian, S., & Arnott, S. (2018). The
Lidcombe Program and child language development: Long-term assessment. Clinical
Linguistics & Phonetics, 32(9), 860–875. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2018.1448897