November 2010 - Marshalla Speech & Language

Month: November 2010

Standardized Oral Motor (OM) Tests

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I need information on evaluating oral-motor skills in school age articulation/phonological cases as well as appropriate oral-motor exercises/goals for educational IEP’s/settings. The only test I know of that will give you a standard score for oral motor skills is my test called the MOST — The Marshalla Oral-Sensorimotor Test. It is available through SuperDuper Publications. The MOST was normed on kids 4;0 – 7;11. It will give you individual scores for jaw, lips, tongue, velum, respiration, phonation, and oscillating oral movements….

Vibration

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am currently working with infants in a multidisciplinary team. The motor therapists are inclined to recommend vibration for oral motor issues. I would like your recommendations regarding the use of oral vibration for kids with low oral tone who have tongue protrusion, decreased speech intelligibility, and difficulty managing food. What are our best practice guidelines for the use of vibration? Any information you have would be very helpful to me. I know of no “best practices guidelines” for…

Picking on Young Therapists

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have been a little put off by your comments about the beliefs of young therapists. As I am sure you realize, everyone starts out as a “young therapist” at one time. Your comments do little to support your new peers in the field. I realize that what you say might accurately portray some “young therapists.” Would you also agree that this is not always the case? It is a challenge for new therapists to establish trust with a…

The Cycles Approach to Therapy

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Can you explain the “cycles approach”? To work in cycles means to work only one week at a time on target phonemes or phonological processes. Therapy progresses through the weeks regardless of whether the client masters the target. For example, the client may have trouble maintaining /s/ in the clusters Sp, St, Sk, Sm, Sn, Sl, Sw, Str, Spr, and so forth. Using cycles, therapy would address one cluster per week. For more information, read the original authors. Look…

Learning R with a Restricting Lingua Frenum

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Does a short frenulum interfere with “R” production? A short frenum will prevent the client from learning what I call the “Tip R.” Most call it the “Retroflex R.” But a short frenum should not prevent the client from learning a “Back R.” My book called Successful R Therapy describes these two different positions for this elusive phoneme.

Classic Resources on Vowel Production

By Pam Marshalla

Q: The clinic I work for recently purchased your CD lecture called Vowel Tracks. I have a B.A. in psychology and work with children in the Autism Spectrum Disorder as a behavior analyst. I loved your product! Have you published any articles in peer-reviewed journals showing results that prove this methodology is effective with children who have very low intelligibility? Vowel Tracks is based on my own 35 years of clinical experiences and classic phonetics research on the vowels. I…

Restricting Lingua Frenum

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am working with a three-year-old with a very restricted lingual frenum, a shortened velum, and significant tongue protrusion. The parents want to try therapy before consulting medical advice about a frenectomy. We have made nice progress thus far. The child chews hard and soft solids with a mushing pattern. No coughing, choking, gagging has ever been observed or reported. She is now able to lateralize her tongue left and right independently of the mandible, and within the past…

Reading, Language, Speech?

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am an SLP in the schools. Often I am asked to address writing as a language goal. What are your thoughts regarding writing as a language goal? Grrrrrr! We are not “Writing-Language Pathologists,” or “Reading-Language Pathologists,” or “Literacy-Language Pathologists.” We are SPEECH-language pathologists! I hope I was not unclear in this response.