The strategy of treating stuttering behaviors have shown a problem in maintaining a controlled speech of stutterer. It seemed essential to treat latent psychological and cognitive characteristics, such as anxiety and attitude, as well as stuttering be...
The strategy of treating stuttering behaviors have shown a problem in maintaining a controlled speech of stutterer. It seemed essential to treat latent psychological and cognitive characteristics, such as anxiety and attitude, as well as stuttering behaviors in order to solve this problem. With an increase of interest in the cognitive function, the cognitive behavior therapy is applied to cure immanent behaviors at the same time as external and prominent behaviors. Especially, there is a need to treat stuttering with greater consideration on the adult stutterer's inclination to recognize and avoid stuttering. Therefore, I performed a study on the effect of self-enhancement on the adult stutterer's cognitions and behaviors.
The subjects of this research were 8 development stutterers who do not have any neurological damage or other speech and development impediments. The self-enhancement therapy systematically consists of self-monitoring phase to identify the characteristics of stuttering, self-comprehension phase for a deeper understanding of the individual's characteristics in the learning process of fluent speech, self-acceptance phase to accept the real self, and self-respect phase to develop respect for one's self. Considering the stuttering behaviors, psychological and recognitive characteristics, I applied behavioral and cognitive methods of recognitive behavior therapy to the activities in each phase. To observe the improvement in stuttering cognition, I examined stuttering perception, self-efficacy, communication attitudes and self-concepts in the before and after assessments and then compared the results. I compared the frequency, type and speech rate of stuttering in the before, interim and after assessments.
The results of this study are as follows.
First of all, the results of stuttering cognition after self-enhancement are the following. The stuttering perception assessment showed that the stutterers' perception of stuttering avoidance, expectance and struggle decreased after the therapy. This means that the adult stutterers who have undergone the self-enhancement therapy have displayed a decrease in stuttering cognition with the decrease in stuttering. The self-efficacy of all subjects increased. They also showed higher scores in not only the confidence of approach attitude in communication but also confidence of fluency performance. They have also positively improved their communication attitude. With mediation, their attitudes in communication situations became more positive and interactive. The self-concept test resulted in great improvements of all subjects, especially in the sociality of the social-self and the present evaluation of the competent self. This shows that they have come to trust the competency of the present self and recognize the present self positively after the self-enhancement therapy.
Secondly, the results of stuttering behavior after the self-enhancement therapy are the following. The stuttering frequency decreased rapidly in the interim assessments 1 and 2, showing that the learning of fluent speech was acquired early in the therapy process. Looking at the changes in the stuttering type, the subjects mostly had block type in reading, monologue and conversation in the beginning, but there was no block types in the after assessment. The self-enhancement process decreased the block types which is a state of high tension and appear a lot in adult stutterers. On the other hand, the speech rate showed no change in the before and after assessment, rather the rate slowed down in the interim assessment process. This is due to the fact that the subjects acquired the ability to adjust fluency in speech by adjusting their speech rate in the early therapy process.
In conclusion, the results of the study show that self-enhancement improved the adult stutterer's cognition and behavior of stuttering changed various characteristics of stutters to affirmative ways.