Serving Bilingual Children Who Stutter - Interview

For a long time, bilingual families were told to discard their native language and to only use English. Many practitioners and clinicians force English on their clients and patients during appointments. Ana Paula G. Souza Mumy and John Gomez join Tim for an interview. Ana Paula's research was recently published and a link to the article will be seen at the bottom of this paragraph. The title of the article is Culturally Responsive Guidelines for Serving Families of Bilingual Children Who Stutter. A few key take aways are: bilingualism does not increase the risk of stuttering, children can endure "code switching" as two languages are used simultaneously, clinicians want to allow the language of the parent to be used in the clinic or the office, and that language choice is about relationship and connection. John Gomez is the director of When I Stutter (keeneyeproductions.com). Ana Paula translated the movie into Portugese, her native language. John is an SLP working in Los Angeles, California and he serves a very diverse community with a heavily bilingual population. As America become more and more bilingual, this is eye opening and ground breaking work by Ana Paula. Link here: https://pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/2022_PERSP-21-00235