Tag: Book Recommendations

Goldenhar Syndrome and Reduced Tongue Movement

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Is oral-motor therapy beneficial in treating a child with Goldenhar syndrome with one-sided facial weakness? If you are asking for “proof” of this, no. But your question reveals perhaps a limited understanding about what the term “oral-motor therapy” means. Let me explain… Speech is movement, and whenever part of the speech movement mechanism is impaired, then therapy needs to address that movement impairment. The term “oral-motor techniques” simply refers to any of the myriad ways in which we facilitate…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Frontal Lisp, Tongue Thrust, Ankyloglossia, Low Tone, and Tactile Defensive Behavior

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have a 5-year-old client who has a tongue thrust on all the sibilants. She also has ankyloglossia, and is low in tone around her mouth and lips. She has a tonic bite reflex and holds her cheeks very tightly when I brush her teeth. She has sensory issues and is very uncomfortable (although cooperative) during teeth brushing. She tends to have an open mouth position and her lips are oftentimes wet. None of this affects her speech intelligibility….

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Down Syndrome

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My son has Down syndrome and possible apraxia. Can you give me advice about this? Many therapists today are labeling children with Down syndrome as apraxia, but this is an incorrect diagnosis. The expressive speech and language problems of children with Down syndrome are the result of dysarthria and cognitive deficit. Dysarthria “A generic label for a group of motor speech disorders caused by weakness, paralysis, slowness, incoordination, or sensory loss in the muscle groups responsible for speech” Brookshire, R. H….

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The Roles of Oral Rest Posture and Neutral Position in Articulation Therapy

By Pam Marshalla

Q: How do oral rest and the neutral position impact articulation? Should we be concerned about these subjects in clients with an articulation/phonological deficit? So very many of our clients have problems with oral rest posture and the neutral position that I get at least one email per week from all over the world from SLP’s trying to figure out what to do about it. I will have a chapter devoted to this topic in my next book to be…

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Exercise Routines

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Which of your books do you suggest for teaching me the number of repetitions or the amount of seconds for engaging in oral-motor exercises? I do not teach oral-motor as if it was an exercise routine; I teach oral-motor techniques to facilitate sound production. Therefore, none of my books will give you that type of information. I do no measures of number of trials, or number of seconds, etc.. Instead I teach how to facilitate a movement to achieve…

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What is Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)?

By Pam Marshalla

The term Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) has been giving practicing SLP’s a lot of trouble recently. This is because some professionals have mistakenly assumed that an evidence-based practice requires that practicing therapists restrict their methods to only those that have been researched in a laboratory. This is a false interpretation of the EBP. The EBP actually integrates information from three sources: LAB, CLINIC, and CLIENT. Let’s review four references that explain this: 1. According to Carol Dollaghan (The handbook for evidence-based…

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Articulation Procedure Basics

By Pam Marshalla

Q: When a child can produce his new sound correctly, do we go for the next level – syllabic level – in the same session? Don’t we have to dedicate a whole session for one goal to be sure that we have achieved the desired result? I always do as much as possible in every session I have with my clients. I try to work on phoneme, syllable, word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and conversation all in the same session if…

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