Category Archives: Why the Lidcombe Program is effective

I have used the LP for many years and found it to be extremely effective. While I appreciate that the behavioural methods we use are ‘atheoretical’ and that they say nothing directly about the nature of stuttering, I wondered whether you have any theories about why the Lidcombe Program works and what papers may have been published about this?

We still can’t say why the Lidcombe Program works. Onslow, Stocker, Packman & McLeod (2002) explored whether acoustic measures of speech timing evidenced change pre and post therapy in children who were treated using the Lidcombe Program. They concluded that there was no evidence to suggest changes in speech timing. Packman, Code & Onslow (2007) suggest that an “operant treatment for early stuttering is effective because it prompts children to learn to adjust for the underlying order tramadol online us pharmacy neural processing deficit at a critical time of speech development” i.e. at a time of neural plasticity.

References:
Onslow, M., Stocker, S., Packman, A., & McLeod, S. (2002). Speech Timing in children after the Lidcombe Program of early stuttering intervention. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 16, 21-23.

Packman, A., Code, C.,& Onslow, M. (2007). On the cause of stuttering: Integrating theory with brain and behavioural research. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 353-362.