The Speech Therapy Session

There, I had the privilege of seeing an Early-Intervention Speech Therapist work with one of my students. She would sit on the floor and play games with him. Through these games, she was able to elicit verbalization from this child who normally grunted to communicate. Over a course of a year, I witnessed his communication skills enhance little-by-little with the assistance of this therapist. I had not realized how much he had improved until I saw him interacting with his friends at the dress-up center. This little boy who would once play alone on the floor was now requesting different objects and laughing with his friends. Recollecting his progress was phenomenal. Inspired by what I saw, I researched more about the field. While doing so, my mother disclosed to me that she and her father had an articulation disorder. Although my grandfather did not receive services, my mother received therapy in school, which she recalls as an unpleasant experience. Taking into account all that I witnessed and learned about the subject, I realized that I had found the middle ground between teacher and therapist that I had been searching for in Speech-Language Pathology.

The scope of practice of speech-language pathology describes the ethical and clinical responsibility of clinicians to implement therapy techniques, which contains efficacy that is supported by evidence. Non-speech oral-motor exercises (NSOMEs), in particular have raised controversy among speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and researchers when treating children with articulation and phonological disorders. The use of NSOMEs is a debated issue in the profession due to the lack of evidence based practice (EBP), poor clinical assumptions, and the avoidance of meeting the client’s needs.

Outcomes of taught target sounds can generalize to other sounds and contexts if the clinician provides the client with adequate training and opportunities, compared to assuming that acquisition in one setting will automatically generalize (McReynolds, 1989). Clinicians must plan for generalization before the start of treatment (Kearns, 1989). Factors for generalization can include: treatment approach and target phonemes. In order for the client to generalize the treatment, therefore showing true success, the client needs an effective treatment approach. Although not one

I hope this finds you well:) Time is flying by and finals are looming in my final semester of classes at the Bristol Community College in their Occupational Therapy Assistant program. Next semester will be all fieldwork and my first choice placement is Greenlock Therapeutic Riding Center. http://www.greenlock.org/. So close--finally!!

The purpose of this evidence based research paper is to evaluate the efficacy of the cycles approach when compared to the traditional articulation therapy approach in the treatment of children who are highly unintelligible. The Cycles Phonological Remediation Approach (Hodson, 2011) is a treatment method for children with severe speech sound disorders. This approach targets phonological pattern errors in a sequential manner. During each cycle, one or more phonological patterns are targeted and after each cycle is complete, another cycle begins. Recycling of phonological patterns continues until the targeted patterns are generalized into the child’s conversational speech. The cycles approach is meant to mirror typical phonological development in children (Hodson, 2011).

The career, Speech Therapist, stood out to me because of the concept of helping someone overcome an issue that they may have had all of their life. By helping a person develop a common skill, you could be changing their life in a positive way. To actually hear the progress you have made through the person’s own mouth is something that would make you feel like you have a purpose and that is to help people make their lives better. The occupation of this career is to basically help people that either have a speech impediment or some type of disorder to communicate better and cope with social malfunctions they may have experienced in their life and will experience in the mere future. So

Before I gave the Goldman Fristoe to Lauren, my client, I asked why she they wanted to bring her in to the Butler University Clinic. The parents said that her preschool teacher had a hard time understanding her in class and suggested to take her to a speech pathologist. Lauren spoken language is English and there were no prior medical issues. Therefore, I decided to give Lauren the Goldman Fristoe to see what phonemes she struggled with. Since Lauren is 4 years, 10 months and 17 days old, I gave her the sounds-in-words section then sounds-in-sentences section for ages 4:0-6:11. During the sounds-in-words section, I showed Lauren a series of pictures and asked her what each picture was. Sometimes I would point out specific out in the picture and asked her what that certain object was. This section focused on

Clinical Implications: Minimal-contrast treatment is effective and efficient for treating children with phonological disability. Avoiding listener confusion is motivating for suppressing process use.

Nick will be working with a Speech Pathologist outside of the classroom, but there are a few in class intervention techniques that I plan to use to help Nick. We have put together a game for center time that will help students to connect phrases to create a full sentence. This will be very beneficial for Nick because he struggles to put his sentences together although he understands what he is trying to say. We have also set up a center that allows Nick and other students to read along with a tape to create a more fluent sentence. Nick's complications with his "R" and "S" will be addressed during speech. We hope that with the Speech intervention Nick will be able to work with "R" and "S" and have an effect on his ability to speak fluently and create complete

Suzie’s ability to accurately produce /d/, /t/, /k/, and /g/ in all positions during unstructured conversation independently was excellent during the session. Her ability to correctly produce /ð/ in all word positions at the word level was also extremely strong given a delayed model and visual cue. At times she produced a /d/ sound instead of

Speech therapy is a long term procedure depending on the disorder. Speech therapy is a popular method of treatment that involves learning new speech techniques (such as speaking syllable-by-syllable) and modifying current ways of speaking (such as reducing the rate of speech). It may also include psychological counseling as a way of boosting self-esteem and reducing the tendency of avoiding fearful situations such as speaking in front of a group.

One therapy used is a combination of both motor speech treatment and phonological treatment. Completed by using a dual treatment of stimulability training protocol and modified core vocabulary treatment (mCVT) (Iuzzini & Forrest, 2010). Stimulability is used in order to target sounds in isolation and at the syllable level, targeting motor speech patterns and the ability to imitate sounds. Evidence shows that children with CAS are able to acquire sounds more quickly when not given direct intervention. The mCVT is a treatment designed to increase the consistency of speech production for children with CAS. This demonstrates that combining treatments, having children with CAS working on multiple treatment goals despite the numerous setbacks they may experience regarding generalization and learning speed these children may demonstrate increases in multiple areas in a parallel

This assignment taught me so much about obtaining a speech sample, administering a standardized test, and analyzing a child’s speech. Prior to doing this assignment, I had never obtained a speech sample from a child or administered a standardized test on a child. Both were very difficult and I am very happy that I have experience now doing both. I do not think I obtained the best representative sample of the child’s speech. I think I would have elicited a better sample if I had obtained the sample after administering the standardized test. If I had administered the test first, I would have seen what phonological and articulation errors the client made and then tried to elicit those errors in the sample. Because I started out with the sample, I did not really know what I was looking for. In addition, I think I would have also gotten a better representative sample from the client if I did not use books to elicit the sample. While I was able to elicit a sample using books, I think I would have gotten a better sample using material that had more variability. With the books, I found that some of the child’s utterances were very short perhaps if using a different material, such as blocks or toy cars, would have elicited longer utterances.

The speech therapist will provide direct articulation therapy two days a week for 30 minutes in a small group setting in the speech classroom. Therapy will focus on improving Andrew's articulation of age appropriate sounds at the sentence level and his overall intelligibility level of connected speech through the use of evidenced-based methods.

Being a speech therapist has always been my dream. When I was small, my grandmother suffered from severe stroke. It was disheartening to see her struggling for speech and for consuming food independently. With the help of speech therapists, her condition improved gradually and now she could nearly go back to live the life the way she did before. Six years later, I applied for the Programme Bachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Sciences and I got rejected. Yet this does not extinguish my determination from pursuing my goal. As I get to know more about the differences between occupational therapy (the programme I am studying) and speech therapy-and upon some self-reflection, I find myself to be more suitable for the latter.