Free Downloadable Books and Videos

No Miracle Cures: A Multifactoral Guide to Stuttering Therapy
by Thomas David Kehoe (2006). Download full text free.

Stuttering is affected by at least five factors: genetics, two neurological abnormalities, responses to stress, and speech-related fears and anxieties. But most stuttering therapy programs address only one issue, such as breathing a certain way, or not hiding your stuttering. Each might help you in some situtations, but you still stutter in other situations. No Miracle Cures instead guides you through treatments for all five factors that contribute to stuttering.

Anti-Stuttering Devices Demonstration and Training Video

33-minute streaming video demonstrating DAF, FAF, slow speech with stretched vowels, and speaking with relaxed breathing and relaxed vocal folds.

Jezer was a talented and entertaining writer, and author of biographies of Abbie Hoffman, Rachel Carson, and other books. This is Jezer's autobiography, and stuttering affected everything in his life. You learn much about stuttering and especially stuttering therapies, because Jezer went through just about every therapy program (and still stuttered).

Stuttering Wikibook. A free, open-content textbook that you're encouraged to add material to. Also Wikipedia has an encyclopedia article about stuttering that anyone can revise.

Recommended Books

Fun With Fluency: Direct Therapy with the Young Child, by Patty Walton, MA-SLP, and Mary Wallace, MA-SLP (1998; ISBN: 1883315395) is the best book I've read about treating children ages two to seven years old. It's about direct stuttering therapy (as opposed to the old, ineffective indirect methods. A hierarchical progression of therapy begins with easy, stretchy speech; making direct requests for easy speech; modeling self-corrections; play speech games; contrast easy speech with hard speech; and embracing the speech villains.

Stuttering: An Integrated Approach to Its Nature and Treatment, by Barry Guitar (1998) is the best textbook about stuttering. The first part of the book presents the essentials of stuttering research. The second part of the book differentiates stuttering modification therapy from fluency shaping therapy, and then shows how to integrate the two therapies. The writing is clear and understandable.

Motor Control and Learning: A Behavioral Emphasis, by Richard Schmidt, Tim Lee (2005; ISBN: 073604258X) is about how our brains learn and execute complex motor (muscle) skills, such as speech. If the stuttering "experts" were to read this book, stuttering therapy would advance fifty years.

Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All in Your Head, by Carla Hannaford (1995; ISBN: 0915556278) shows how (and why) to use cross-lateral exercises to enhance learning. When we learn one thing in one area of our brain, and learn something else in another area, sometimes the different areas of the brain fail to communicate. Because stutterers have more activity in their right hemispheres during speech, when non-stutterers have more activity in their left hemispheres during speech, cross-lateral exercises might enhance stuttering therapy.

Knotted Tongues, by Benson Bobrick (1996). Bobrick is a historian, and the bulk of the book is about historical and literary persons who stuttered. These include Moses, Charles I, Lewis Carroll, Henry James, W. Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, and Marilyn Monroe. Bobrick also covers the history of stuttering treatments. Knotted Tongues is written for non-professionals. The book also has a thirty-page overview of stuttering science, and a twenty-page overview of stuttering therapies.

The Loop, by Nicholas Evans (1998; ISBN 0440224624) Like Evans' first novel The Horse Whisperer, this book is set in Montana. The central characters are a successful rancher and Luke, the rancher's 18-year-old son. Luke stutters, and the father punishes him as if stuttering were a character flaw. The other teenagers ridicule Luke. His speech-language pathologist (who uses stuttering modification therapy) is sincere but ineffective. Luke decides not to go to college because he's afraid to talk. He's happy alone in the mountains, watching his father's cattle. Or so his father thinks. Luke is actually watching a family of wolves. When his father wants to kill the wolves, Luke courageously stands up to his father.