Relative efficacy of intensive and spaced behavioral treatment of stuttering.
Intensive and spaced fluency training work equally well for adolescents/adults who stutter—choose the schedule that best fits your client’s life.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked: does it matter if we pack fluency drills into one long block or spread them out? They randomly assigned teens and adults who stutter to either an intensive daily program or the same number of sessions split across weeks.
Both groups got the same behavioral package: prolonged speech, gentle onsets, and feedback. The only difference was the calendar.
What they found
Both schedules cut stuttering, raised speaking rate, and improved confidence. Gains stayed strong right after treatment and moved to real-life talking.
There was no winner. Intensive and spaced worked equally well, so you can pick the timetable that suits your client’s life.
How this fits with other research
Gaylord-Ross et al. (1995) followed children 3.5 years later and saw most keep their fluency. That long view fills the gap E et al. left open, because the 1989 study only checked maintenance briefly.
Montes et al. (2021) swapped the drills for awareness training and still helped college adults. The positive outcome repeats, showing the active ingredient can be practice or attention, not just one technique.
Porritt et al. (2009) seems to clash: they found tighter, faster trials beat spaced ones for learning conditional discriminations. The difference is skill type. Rapid drills help new rule learning, but once the rules are set, spacing keeps stutterers from fatigue without hurting results.
Why it matters
You no longer need to block out whole weeks for intensive fluency boot camps. If a high-school student has sports every night, spread the same hours across afternoons. The progress will match the intensive track, and you will keep the family on board.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Twenty adult and adolescent stutterers were randomly assigned to two treatment formats consisting of either 16 two-hour sessions of fluency training administered within a concentrated period of four consecutive days (intensive treatment), or two two-hour sessions per week for eight weeks (spaced treatment). Frequency of stuttering and rate of speaking were repeatedly assessed from speech samples obtained in six different clinic and extra-clinic speech settings. The efficiency of treatment, subject compliance, and communication "attitudes" were also measured. Fluency training produced significant reductions in stuttering frequency, and significant improvements in speaking rate and communication attitudes for both treatment formats. Both formats were found equivalent on all measures. In addition, generalization of treatment effects was observed in all settings. However, maintenance of generalization effects was uneven across settings, suggesting the possible need for differential levels of training for different speaking situations.
Behavior modification, 1989 · doi:10.1177/01454455890133006