For communications science professor Barry Guitar, The King’s Speech -- the Oscar-nominated film that documents King George III’s struggles to vanquish a crippling stutter -- had unusual resonance.

Not only did Guitar overcome a severe stutter himself, with the help of an unconventional and empathetic speech therapist not unlike Lionel Logue in the film, he is also an evangelist for a controversial form of speech therapy aimed at children aged four to six that he believes would eradicate in the adult population suffering of the kind the king endured.

The therapy, called the Lidcombe method, was developed in Australia in the 1990s. Its “active ingredients,” as Guitar calls them, are two interventions that are anathema to conventionally trained speech therapists in the United States and Europe: in a daily 15-minute speech session, with many informal follow-ups, parents -- trained by a Lidcombe specialist -- praise their child for fluent talk and, in an encouraging, upbeat tone, periodically ask that stammered words be repeated.

On the eve of an Academy Awards ceremony many critics say will be The King’s Speech’s night, UVM Today sat down with Guitar -- a scholar of international stature whose much praised text on stuttering is ubiquitous in speech pathology classrooms -- to get his thoughts on the Lidcombe method and the future of stuttering treatments.

UVM Today: You’re utterly convinced of the efficacy of the Lidcombe method. Why?

Guitar: Primarily because of the data the Australians have gathered in more than 100 studies, including some bigger ones that are very rigorously controlled. They showed quite definitely that Lidcombe was better than whatever the (control group) therapist happened to be using. What makes me most passionate are our results here. For the first 15 kids we saw when we were just starting out with Lidcombe in about 2000, the results were really good. For all the kids, we got them completely fluent at home and here (in the office). A couple years ago, one of my students worked with seven children, and we got the same dramatic results. The long term results are also very good.

What is it about the therapy that, to this day, inspires the disdain of your academic colleagues in the U.S. and Europe, 20 years after it was developed? There was even a tiff in last week’s Nature between an English critic and a group of Lidcombe’s Australian pioneers.

I think it goes against the grain of what people naturally feel about kids who stutter -- and the training of the last 50 years. They feel that if the child is struggling, and if they call attention to it or talk to the child about it, the child will become even more self-conscious. From my point of view, it’s like your child falls and scrapes his knee up and starts crying and you think, I’m going to ignore this. That doesn’t make sense. There was also something that Peter Howell (the critic in Nature) captured in that put-down of Lidcombe as something you’d use in dog-training, which is still in a lot of people’s hearts and mind. They can’t bear to think that an operant conditioning program is going to work, and don’t realize that -- given the extensive counseling we do with parents -- that’s just a tiny piece of the program.

These critics often favor something called “indirect therapy” as opposed to therapies that directly engage the child, like Lidcombe. What is indirect therapy?

Indirect therapy is having the environment change. And so the most powerful part of the environment is the parents and their conversational style. If you have parents who are really willing to slow their speech rate, talk about the way Mr. Rogers did, and they do it a lot, you can have some pretty quick effects. And so, I’m not opposed to that, and I think it’s great for kids who are just starting to stutter and don’t really seem to be aware of it. It’s just that the effects you get, once stuttering has set its teeth, once the child is self conscious about it, are not nearly as great. It just reduces it somewhat but doesn’t really seem to eradicate it.

Talk about the Lidcombe therapy session itself. It’s fun for the child, right?

Yes. That’s a sine qua non.  In other words, don’t do the therapy session if it’s not fun for the kiddo.  Stand on your head, or use candy, or other sorts of rewards, pick games the kid has fun with and give that child one-on-one attention, so that he or she has got time with a parent.  It’s a time the child enjoys.

The program targets kids who are six or under. Why is that?

Age 6 is magic.  We don’t know what it is about the age.  Is it the peers at school?  Or is it a cognitive thing?  Kids over six begin saying, I have to stop doing this. And that gets you in trouble. 

You were the first American to adopt Lidcombe 10 years ago and -- aside from a former student and a former colleagues -- are still the only American academician doing clinical research on the method.  What was it like for you to so depart from the norm?

I was prepared to dislike it at first, because it went against the training that I had. I found it a little bit hard as a person who stutters to say, 'Could you say (whatever the word is) again.' I mean (laughs), I probably didn’t say it with great conviction.  It’s just that once you see it work, it’s a delight. And I think part of the delight comes from the kid’s pride, because the kid is hearing, 'That was really smooth talking. That was really nice talking.' So kids will spontaneously say, 'Mom I’m a good talker, aren’t I?' ... That’s wonderful.

What would the possibilities be, do you think, if the Lidcombe method were widely adopted?

I think if people did Lidcombe and other direct therapies and were doing it carefully, and had training and were mentored, there’s no reason that stuttering couldn’t be wiped out. Obviously it depends on how well you can reach out. There are going be a lot of families who just couldn’t afford therapy. But if you could reach out that way, and kept up the effort ... then we could get stuttering down to a very tiny amount.

What do you say to your colleagues who continue to advocate on behalf of other less effective methods?

Increasingly, our field is becoming aware that the practice should be based on scientific evidence for the effectiveness of our treatments. To be an effective clinician for people who stutter, one should read the literature carefully and on that basis decide what treatments have the best evidence for long term outcome. And if you do that, it’s  quite clear that, especially for the age group of four to six, Lidcombe has overwhelmingly good evidence for its effectiveness. 

What do you think The King’s Speech chances are this weekend?

I think it’s going to do great. I thought it was a wonderful movie where the script really dug down into what the experience of stuttering is like and revealed how powerful a good speech therapist can be, even with an adult who has been stuttering for years and years. I am not in agreement with the implication that parents cause stuttering, and so I think that was good for dramatic reason, but there’s so much evidence that parents don’t cause stuttering that I wish that hadn’t been part of the movie.