How a unique, virtual clinic at �������� helps individuals who stutter

Individuals who stutter can be a bit like a walking thesaurus, notes �������� Assistant Professor of Speech and Language Pathology Cody Dew, PhD ’25.

They’re well-aware of the sounds that trip them up and may swap in different words to prevent verbal stumbles. Or they may simply back out of the conversation and let other people do the talking.

Dew knows all the avoidance behaviors, and not only from his professional training: He has a stutter himself.

In 2015, as an undergraduate student at the University of Toledo in Ohio, he went to his first speech therapy appointment with Professor and Founding Director of Speech and Language Pathology Rodney Gabel, now his colleague at ��������’s Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences. The experience led him to change his major and ultimately set the course for his career; as a graduate student, he worked in Gabel’s clinic as the clinician providing therapy and joined him after Decker established its Division of Speech and Language Pathology in 2019.

Gabel’s research and clinical work use a social model for stuttering, which is, as he points out, not a disorder. Simply put, stuttering is a neurophysiological difference. The real problem isn’t a halting rhythm or the repetition of particular sounds.

“I always explain to my clients that how you talk is how you talk. How you talk is natural. The things you do to not stutter are what’s really causing the problem,” Gabel says. “People make a lot of extra movements and create tension in an effort not to stutter. That creates all kinds of abnormal behavioral patterns, feelings and attitudes that make communicating — and life — very difficult.”

The best strategy is to let the words come out as they do and simply move on without reaction. But that can be challenging to learn, and speech therapists who focus on stuttering are few and far between, especially in rural areas.

That’s why ��������’s Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic offered a Virtual Intensive Stuttering Clinic for Adolescents and Adults over the summer. Held from June 2 through July 3 via Zoom, it was the first virtual intensive clinic of its kind.

The Division of Speech Language Pathology is also working toward establishing Camp Dream.Speak.Live., a program developed at the University of Texas at Austin’s Arthur M. Blank Center for Stuttering Education and Research. The free, in-person intensive camp focuses on children ages 5 to 15. While the camp didn’t materialize in time for this summer, organizers hope to host it in 2026.

Plans are to run the unique clinic and future camp annually.

“We’ve opened the virtual intensive clinic up to the whole country because the story is the same: There’s just not a lot of people who specialize in working with stuttering,” Dew says.

What is stuttering?

Neurophysiological differences in the brain cause stuttering, although Dew notes that researchers have yet to determine the nature of those differences.

A common misconception is that it’s psychological in origin, caused by anxiety or shyness, says Ladan Khoshbin, a doctoral student in ��������’s Community Research and Action (CRA) program who spent 14 years working as a speech-language pathologist in her native Iran. Another myth: If individuals simply work hard enough, they can speak the same way as everyone else.

The condition occurs in around 1% of the population, which equates to more than 3 million people in the United States and 68 million worldwide. It’s more prevalent in young children: about 5% stutter and 80% of them ultimately grow out of it. If you’re among the 20% whose stutter persists when you start school, then you will most likely have the condition for life.

Today, speech therapy for stuttering isn’t focused on increasing fluency or the seamless forward flow of words.

For someone with a stutter, fluency may require slowing down and lengthening words in a way that sounds unnatural. This unnatural shaping of speech increases tension, anxiety and stress — all of which worsen stuttering in a vicious cycle. Instead, the clinical programs at �������� teach clients to approach speech in a more relaxed way. When stuttering happens, one strategy is to perform a mental “body scan” to notice and release any sources of physical tension.

Dew likes to tell clients: “You can’t control that you stutter, but you can control how you stutter.”

The best conversations are those in which the speaker can say everything they want to say, without feeling physical stress, Dew says. Speech is ultimately about meaning and connection, not whether words flow seamlessly.

That’s the model behind the virtual clinic, whose participants ranged in age from 13 to their 40s.

“We’re about helping people communicate as well as they possibly can,” Gabel says, “whether they stutter or not.”

Each participant was paired with a graduate student as the clinician providing the therapy. In addition to hour-long, one-on-one sessions, participants also engaged in group work with their peers. That can be a deeply meaningful experience; many individuals who stutter may not have met another person with the condition, says Kiana Tanghatar, a doctoral student in CRA who also worked as a speech therapist in Iran.

“They will see people with the same challenges and the same struggles and work through them together,” she says. “They see they are not alone.”

Shaping careers

The virtual clinic also helps train future clinicians, deepening their knowledge of the field.

In preparation, the SLP division held training days that prepared the graduate students to conduct the clinic’s sessions and activities. Both Gabel and Dew were available to supervise and provide feedback during the clinic.

Mallory Beard, a master’s student in the speech-language pathology program, will use research from the clinic for her capstone project on how an individual’s feelings about their stutter change after intervention. After earning her master’s degree, Beard hopes to work in early intervention for children with speech difficulties.

Like her peers, master’s student Paige Voight sees clients in the University’s speech and hearing clinic; the intensive stuttering clinic was her first experience working over Zoom. She was originally interested in working with children, but found herself intrigued by working with adult clients.

“Grad school is all about getting experience in the field,” Voight says. “This was a great opportunity for me to learn.”

Doctoral students working with Gabel and Dew typically have experience working as speech-language pathologists. Working on projects such as the clinic and future camp can aid in research, some of which has global applications.

Tanghatar — a native speaker of Persian — is researching stuttering in bilingual and multilingual contexts, and the effects of mindfulness and empathy on treatment. The majority of evidence-based stuttering treatments and protocols were developed in monolingual, English-speaking countries, and protocols are needed for communities that speak other languages, she says.

There’s a myth that implicates bilingualism in the development of stuttering, urging parents to speak to their child in only one language to avoid confusion. This actually isn’t the case, Tanghatar says.

Emmanuel Kwaku Addo, a doctoral student in the CRA program, is interested in working with children and teens, drawing on his own experiences growing up in Ghana as a person who stutters. This fall, he plans to hold the first-ever camp for children who stutter in his home country in collaboration with the Arthur M. Blank Center for Stuttering Education and Research. Ghana has a population of around 35 million people, but only 64 speech-language pathologists, not all of whom have experience working with children who stutter.

“The need is quite great, which is why I’m very happy for the opportunity to offer this,” Addo says.