ABSTRACT
In the past, work on a client’s rate of speech has meant imposing a consistently slow pace across all his utterances. Techniques such as slow speech, a method popular in the 1970s, taught clients to regulate their speech to a prescribed number of syllables or words per minute and, using a behavioural approach, structured speech into units of increasing length and/ or complexity. For example, the Monterey Fluency Program (used mainly with children) used sentences of increasing length and gradually extended the amount of speaking time required from the client (Ryan & Van Kirk, 1971).
