Therapy Services

The Madison Center uses an Integral Stimulation approach to treat children diagnosed with DAOS. This approach to treatment requires the client to imitate utterances modeled by the clinician, with attention focused on both the auditory model and visual attention to the clinician’s face (Strand & Skinder, 1999). In addition, gestural, tactile and prosodic cues are also emphasized to achieve correct movement gestures for speech.

The Madison Center implements a Sound Buddy Program designed to heighten the child’s awareness to the similarities and differences between speech sounds. Each sound buddy is named and has a corresponding visual cue. Some of the more common speech buddies include Sammy the Snake /s/, Fluffy the Angry Cat /f/, Cookie Monster /k/, Gabby the Frog /g/, Shelly the Shell /sh/, and Thelma the Angry Goose /th/.

Our therapists utilize an interactive, play-based approach to develop functional speech and language skills. The therapists collaborate with team members from the child’s school and work closely with the client’s parents to develop carry over of skills to the home and school environments.

Due to the nature of stuttering being so variable, we try to assess each child’s speech in a variety of situations. We believe in treating the child who stutters using two different approaches or an integration of the two; stuttering modification (modifying the moments of stuttering) and fluency shaping (establishing fluency across different settings and using “smooth speech” skills). The intervention strategies our therapists choose are based solely on the individual’s needs. These needs can be influenced by what triggers the individual’s disfluent speech, what we are trying to accomplish long term, and what behaviors need modification. Ultimately by the end of therapy services, our goal is for the client who stutters to achieve and maintain their fluent speech in all environments.

Our goal is to improve the child’s ability to communicate meaningfully and successfully with others. We implement roll playing and conversations to teach the child how to engage and relate to others appropriately in given social situations. Emphasis is placed on a variety of social skill areas, such as body space, non verbal communication, asking questions to gain more information, topic initiation, conversational exchanges and maintaining a topic, to mention a few. Most importantly, we direct attention to improving the child’s ability to become a flexible thinker and know that others think, perceive and believe differently from them, and that is acceptable.