Answers & Advice Blog - Page 38 of 52 - Marshalla Speech & Language

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.

Attaining and Maintaining Intelligibility with Dysarthria

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have a ten-year-old client who is very hard to understand, although he has no specific phoneme errors. We’ve started doing a pacing board which is helpful. I know that oral-motor exercises are taboo these days, but I feel in some way I have to address motor weakness. The greatest and most effective technique for dysarthria is EXAGGERATION of speech. This is spoken of in virtually all books on traditional articulation therapy and more modern texts on motor speech…

Advice for Pierre-Robin Syndrome

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Can you give our family advice about stimulating speech, language, and feeding in a 14-month old girl with Pierre-Robin Syndrome? She is making some sounds and is pretty smart. We have read your book Becoming Verbal with Childhood Apraxia and it has helped us understand about stimulating sound and word productions. Although she continues to be fed through a G-tube, she now is eating many different foods orally. Let me just make some straightforward statements about how I would…

When /d/ Is the Only Consonant

By Pam Marshalla

There is a question that arose in a seminar recently that I want to share. I was teaching on apraxia, and using the 23 methods of jaw, lip, and tongue facilitation as the main focus of the class. The question was about a three-year-old boy who had no other consonants but /d/. He was speaking single words of 1-3 syllables, but his productions were limited to CV structure. Thus, telephone would be produced as “deh-duh-doh.” The question the therapist had…

Parent Seeking Advice About the Lateral Lisp

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My 5-year-old is in articulation therapy with a speech pathologist for half-hour per week to treat a lateral lisp. Is this intense enough? And what is the best thing for me to do at home to help her practice? One half-hour session per week with homework activities is intense enough for a lateral lisp. That is precisely what I give my clients. Success all depends upon whether or not the therapist knows what he or she is doing. The…

Licking Habit and Autism

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I am looking for something to assist us with a student who stimulates by licking everything in sight. Are there any strategies for decreasing this behavior? It interferes with his attending during class. I have worked so little with kids on the autism spectrum that I do not know how to answer this. I have never had to extinguish a behavior like this. I can say this however: I would not consider this an oral-motor problem. This is a…