Charles Gage Van Riper

Charles Gage Van Riper (December 1, 1905 – September 25, 1994) was a renowned speech therapist who became internationally known as a pioneer in the development of speech pathology. A severe stutterer throughout his career,

Biography Charles Van Riper, known to his family as Cully,

In 1936, Charles was hired by the Western State Normal School in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Charles stuttered throughout his career despite trying almost every sort of stuttering therapy, ranging from rhythmic control, relaxation, slow speech, and breathing exercises, to psychoanalysis and hypnosis. He eventually managed to become very fluent even though he continued to stutter. Charles wrote in a letter to a newsletter that he had lived a "very successful and happy life", a result of an idea that came to him while hitch-hiking his way home from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he had spent a month as the hired man on a farm, pretending to be a deaf mute because his stuttering was so severe that he could not get any other employment: he met an old stutterer who said that he was "too old and tired to fight myself now so I just let the words leak out"; Charles realised that he should have been seeking a way of stuttering that would be tolerable both to others and himself, instead of avoiding and hiding his stutter.

Career Charles Van Riper developed stuttering modification therapy between 1936 and 1958. This type of therapy focussed on reducing the fears and anxieties of adult stutterers, and added methods to modify the "core behaviors" of stuttering, to make them less physically stressful. This therapy is one of the most widely practiced stuttering treatments.

Charles approached stuttering from the viewpoint that the stutterer should scrutinize his stuttering behavior, to become aware of everything he did from anticipation of stuttering, to struggling during a block, and to the utterance of the word. A speech-language clinician using his methodology was to explain to her client the nature of the many attitudes and behaviors of stutterers. Wendell Johnson, a member of the same graduate program in Iowa who also became renowned for his work in the field of stuttering, said that Charles Van Riper's methodology was hard work.#tag:ref|Johnson advocated a method in which the stutterer spoke the initial sound of a word relatively slowly and easily, until he felt that his tension had drained away, before uttering the rest of the word. This was in contrast to the "hard work" advocated by Charles Van Riper. and his therapy methods have seen many applications, including uses in guides for speech therapists and in whole therapy programs.

Charles was the subject of the Western Michigan University's informal talk for emeriti and friends on November 14, 2007, which discussed his professional history and writings about his childhood. A series of nine films that show several of his therapy sessions with an adult stutterer and discusses the long term effectiveness of the therapy, has been called a "classic".