The Influence of Treatment on Children's Recovery From Stuttering: Comments on Kefalianos et al. (2017) and Leech et al. (2017)

Response to the Letter to the Editor From Marcotte (2019) Regarding "The History of Stuttering by 7 Years: Follow-Up of a Prospective Community Cohort" by Kefalianos et al. (2017)

Purpose The purpose of this letter is to respond to Marcotte's (2019) letter to the editor, "The Influence of Treatment on Children's Recovery from Stuttering: Comments on Kefalianos et al. (2017) and Leech et al. (2017)," published by the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Language Growth Predicts Stuttering Persistence Over and Above Family History and Treatment Experience: Response to Marcotte

Purpose This response addresses comments made by Marcotte (2019) regarding our recent publication, "Preliminary Evidence That Growth in Productive Language Differentiates Childhood Stuttering Persistence and Recovery" ( Leech, Bernstein Ratner, Brown, & Weber, 2017 ). Marcotte calls into question our finding that language growth is a valid predictor of recovery from stuttering because we did not account for treatment and family history. Conclusions In response to her comments, we provide additional empirical analyses couched in a larger discussion of the difficulty of calibrating treatment and family history of stuttering. In short, we show that once treatment history and family history of stuttering are accounted for, the effect of language growth remains a significant predictor of stuttering persistence.