Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

April 16, 2023

Stuttering Therapy with ChatGPT

As a graduate course instructor gearing up to teach my first course in the ChatGPT era, I’ve wondered how students, novice clinicians, and clinical generalists (those without expertise with a specific clinical population) might rely on generative AI to fill in knowledge gaps and generate ideas for therapy. Speech-language pathology has an enormous scope of practice with constantly updating research, making it practically impossible for an average clinician to keep up with best practices in any one area. And if you do try to dive in to refresh your knowledge, it’s difficult to find your footing in a sea of information. 

If we start relying on tools like ChatGPT to filter through the noise and bubble up the key ideas, will this facilitate more evidence-based practice? Or will we be at risk of continuing the old mistakes, if that’s the bulk of the Internet’s text-based corpus?

With just a few weeks until class starts, I decided to test this out myself!

This post covers:

- The importance of prompts quality and asking the right questions
- Treatment planning prompts examples and responses
- Evaluation of ChatGPT output
- How to ensure evidence-based practice while using AI
- Implications for clinical educators

Read more

January 29, 2022

Just Stop With The Damn Disfluency Counts

In this post, I will present a brief introduction to:

  1. Why disfluency counts are clinically irrelevant at best, and harmful at worst
  2. How to record physical components of stuttering in clinically relevant and helpful ways
  3. How to stop using outdated and harmful disfluency count tools at your place of work

Read more

April 19, 2021

Fuel for the Journey: Doing the Thing You Cannot Do

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

Read more

June 24, 2020

Bridging the Treatment Gap: Research Trends and the 3Es Model

We at speech IRL were proud to unveil our 3Es model in a recent post as our overarching “approach” to speech therapy. With the knowledge that each client has a unique and nuanced set of needs, the process of identifying goals and planning treatments had always eluded a uniform step-by-step formula—until now. The 3Es supramodel (Education, Ease, and Empowerment) is broad enough to encompass all other therapy approaches, yet practical enough to help clinicians and their clients identify values-based goals and then plan specific treatments to reach those goals. A successful application of the model will create an accessible, robust, and structured “menu” of activities that can be flexibly combined throughout the course of treatment.

The need for a new supramodel became abundantly clear when we took a close look at research trends and developments from the last decade and noticed that most of it was not accounted for in a current therapy model. In this post we will provide some background information on the models that informed the 3Es, then take a dive into the research trends that we believe the 3Es model accounts for in ways that other treatment approaches have been insufficient.

If you love stuttering research, join us on July 14th for our next Dine & Development, where Courtney Luckman and Natalie Belling will summarize the latest and greatest in our trademark informal, conversational learning format. Eligible for ASHA CEUs!

Read more

December 15, 2019

Stuttering on screen in 2019

So, to get us all up to speed on "stuttering stereotypes for 2019," (hint: there ain't no such thing!) here are three examples of recent nuanced portrayals of stuttering on screen. These characters are not villains, dunces, or terrified of their own shadow. With 70 million PWS around the globe, we finally have a growing collection of on-screen stories with people who stutter as regular people with hopes, dreams and love interests.

Read more

October 7, 2019

Resources for Stuttering

Support groups

National Stuttering Association: Provides support, friendship, and information to the stuttering community. Hosts annual conference bringing together hundreds of people who stutter and their loved ones, and has local chapters throughout the country.

FRIENDS: Provides support, education, and empowerment to children and teens who stutter, their families and clinicians. Hosts annual convention and regional one-day conferences throughout the year. Offers mentor/mentee program - Stepping Up

Shared Voices: Community center in the greater Chicagoland community providing a home for people who stutter, and people impacted by stuttering, by creating a safe space and meaningful opportunities for connection.

SAY: The Stuttering Association for the Young: Empowers, educates, and supports young people who stutter and the world that surrounds them. Programs include summer camp, speech therapy, and after-school programs.

Read more

May 22, 2019

Rapport: the key to successful stuttering treatment

Stuttering treatment is a mystery. Traditional interventions that prioritize fluency drills and speech strategies often fail to generalize. We are left wondering, why isn’t the client making progress?

Maybe we're looking in all the wrong places.

Read more

July 13, 2018

The Stuttering Block

The mysterious Stuttering block explained

“I have trouble speaking sometimes. The words don’t come out fluent, or they don’t come out at all. This happens especially when I’m excited, nervous, or during stressful situations.”

”No no, not stuttering. Just….stuck.”

"Stuttering is when people repeat or prolong sounds, right?"

WRONG!

Read more

June 26, 2018

Introducing Shared Voices, A Community for People Who Stutter

Dear speech IRL friends,

As you all know, community is one of the founding values of speech IRL. We believe that access to a supportive, accepting, challenging community is essential for successful communication and personal growth.

As an extension of the values and work that we hold dear at speech IRL, I am deeply excited to share with you about a very special endeavor that I’ve had the honor to work on for the past year. Welcome to Shared Voices Chicago: A Community for People Who Stutter.

Shared Voices is envisioned as a Chicago-based non-profit community center for people who stutter, by people who stutter. We want people who stutter to speak authentically and confidently in their professional and personal lives, without fear of judgment or barriers to success.

This is a first-of-its-kind concept: a brick-and-mortar meeting space, both safe and empowering, that welcomes PWS into a safe community, and simultaneously supports them to go out and create a better world for people with diverse voices. This is not a speech therapy clinic. All activities will be created by the stuttering community, for the stuttering community, to meet the needs of today and change the world for tomorrow.

Read more