Sunday, May 3, 2009
Another popular procedures used for speech therapy is the cognitive-linguistic approach.
Cycles Approach. This procedure is actually auditory bombardment. Treatment cycles having their designated phonemes are taught in a span of 2-4 weeks. The child/ patient will be bombarded with the phonemes that he needs to learn without him being aware of it.
Auditory bombarding with PACT (Parents and Children Together). In this approach, production is not the over-all emphasis. Funny, perceptually salient make-up words like ker-plunk, boing, shilly-shally or kaboom are used. The purpose is that the words containing the phonemes are being targeted.
Modified cycles approach. The therapist makes purposeful and obvious lexical errors in words containing the target phonemes so that the child/ patient will correct the clinician, thus producing the target sound. The parents, however, must be involved for explaining the goals, procedures, and assignments.
Minimal contrast therapy. In this procedure, the child/patient contrasts the presence and absence of phonemes, also establishing the difference between phonemes. This procedure is effectively used in addressing perceptual or production difficulties when it comes to final sounds of words. For example the difference between words like fee and feet is contrasted.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Speech therapy procedure uses a traditional approach or motor approach. It is structure-based and involves various drills. These drills includes stimulus presentation to test the accuracy of the patient’s response to the stimulus .
Auditory training. This is one aspect of the motor approach and the proponent is Charles Van Riper. Auditory training uses pictures and games as motivational events or events; this are the stimuli. Activities are more about speech sound discrimination to achieve awareness and detection of sound.
Oral motor structures. This is used when muscle weakness or spasticity is shown in the oral motor assessment . It is a fun activity for children and uses mirrors for visual feedback. The patient can see himself as he tries to produce the sounds/words.
Phonetic placement. Another procedure developed by Van Riper which provides clients with verbal descriptions or instructions regarding articulatory position and movements for target sound. It is usually used accompanied by visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic cues.
Modified sensory motor approach. Weiner’s modified sensory motor approach makes use of a word in which the target sound is correct in the final position and is paired with a word in which the same sound is in error in the initial position. The child/patient must produce the words without a pause to facilitate assimilation of the incorrectly produced sound.
Syllabication. This procedure uses the syllable-by-syllable production of words. The goal of this procedure is to address weak syllable deletion or the deletion of the syllable in a word which is the least stressed.
Chaining. This is a closely related to syllabication where the child/patient is first asked to say the whole word. If he produces a syllable incorrectly, the therapist instructs the patient to look at his lips was he produces the word syllable by syllable with the patient following him after every syllable. This the child/patient does until he produces the word the same way as the therapist did.
Monday, March 2, 2009
A common problem in speech fluency is stuttering. As the child develops his speech, a childhood disorder may be observable. Stuttering is a disorder of childhood (developmental) that is characterized by an abnormally high frequency or duration of stoppages in the forward flow of speech.
Stuttering is sometimes mistaken for normal developmental disfluency. However, a child who stutters has escape behaviors, avoidance behaviors, and other secondary behaviors called physical concomitants. Stuttering is usually accompanied by eye blinks, head nods, jaw tremors and total body gyrations.
Management For Stuttering
Between the ages 1 ½- 11 years old, stuttering may manifest in some children. However this kind of fluency disorder mostly occurs during early childhood stage, from 2-6 years old. Parents can tell if their children has this condition when the speech has 5% or greater repetitions and 1% or greater prolongations.
Therapeutic intervention is the best approach to help overcome this condition. These include environmental manipulation, direct work with the child, psychological therapy, desensitization therapy, parent-child interaction therapy, fluency-shaping behavioral therapy, and parent and family counseling
