Early treatment urged on child stuttering.Children who suffer from a stutter stut·tern. A phonatory or articulatory disorder characterized by difficult enunciation of words with frequent halting and repetition of the initial consonant or syllable. v. To utter with spasmodic repetition or prolongation of sounds. should be treated before they start school, researchers said today. It is estimated that around 5% of youngsters develop a stutter, usually at the age of three or four. A study, published in the British Medical Journal The British Medical Journal, or BMJ, is one of the most popular and widely-read peer-reviewed general medical journals in the world.[2] It is published by the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd (owned by the British Medical Association), whose other , looked at whether a behavioural treatment known as the Lidcombe programme was more effective at tackling stuttering than leaving the problem to resolve naturally. Researchers studied 54 children aged three to six in New Zealand New Zealand (zē`lənd), island country (2005 est. pop. 4,035,000), 104,454 sq mi (270,534 sq km), in the S Pacific Ocean, over 1,000 mi (1,600 km) SE of Australia. The capital is Wellington; the largest city and leading port is Auckland. and the group was split, with 29 taking part in the Lidcombe programme and 25 acting as controls to see if the problem went away naturally. After nine months the frequency of stuttering in the control group was reduced by an average of 43%, but only 15% of youngsters had reached a minimum level of stuttering ( 1% of syllables. But in the treatment group, the frequency of stuttering reduced by 77% and over half of the youngsters (52%) had attained a minimum levels of stuttering. |
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