Tag: Dysarthria

Cerebral Palsy and Intelligibility

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My 12-year-old grandson has cerebral palsy. He understands everything at age level but he is very hard to understand. He is getting very little speech help. How can we help him at home? Expressive speech is divided into Consonants, Vowels, Syllables, and Intonation Patterns. Most SLP’s focus on Consonants. I would suggest that you focus on Vowels, Syllables and Inflection instead. In other words, have your grandson practice important words, and instead of focusing on getting the consonants correct,…

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Lateral Lisp and Dysarthria

By Pam Marshalla

Q: My client had a stroke when he was a baby, and he has both slurred speech and a lateral lisp. Do you think he can learn to develop a central groove for the sibilants? Only time will tell. In the meantime, focus your therapy less on individual phonemes and more on improving intelligibility by helping him learn to speak up, speak out, and over-exaggerate. Exaggeration is the method recommended most often for clients with dysarthria.

Fear in Labeling Motor Speech Disorders

By Pam Marshalla

Q: This seems perhaps silly, but I have to admit that I am afraid of labeling a client with apraxia or dysarthria. Perhaps it is because I took no formal class on motor speech disorders while I was in college, and I have had to piece information together myself. Can you advise me? I too was afraid of motor speech for years. In fact people asked me to speak about it for some 20 years before I felt brave enough…

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What is PROMPT?

By Pam Marshalla

Q: Can you explain the PROMPT method you mention in your class on apraxia and dysarthria? PROMPT is short for the system called “Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets” developed by Deborah Hayden. It is a tactile cueing technique for phoneme production. The trainer uses hands-on tactile cues – she touches on and around the client’s mouth – to shape the mouth for speech sound production. On their website, the PROMPT method is described as: “the systematic manipulation of…

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Frequency of Therapy with Childhood Apraxia and Dysarthria

By Pam Marshalla

Q: How often should a young child (2-4 years of age) with apraxia or dysarthria receive speech-language therapy services? I have a baseline that all my clients with motor speech disorders have to meet. They must attend once per week for one hour at a minimum. Twice per week is very nice. Three times per week is a complete luxury. More than that is unnecessary because these children do not change very fast. Children with motor speech disorders take a…

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Oral Motor Treatment and Non-Speech Oral Motor Exercises (NSOME)

By Pam Marshalla

Once again I shall take a run at the question of what oral motor treatment is, and what are the differences between oral motor treatment and non-speech oral-motor exercises. This answer ensued from an email dialogue I was having with someone very concerned that SLP’s have begun to use non-speech oral-motor exercises INSTEAD of methods to facilitate sound and word productions. I tried to explain how this is wrong. ALL methods to improve speech are “oral” techniques, and they are…

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Resonance

By Pam Marshalla

Q: I have just picked up a young man of 14 years with a moderate degree of learning difficulties and a range of speech difficulties. He is in special school but has received very little direct therapy. He has a particularly hyponasal quality, and some hypernasality too. Would you view this as a priority? He is interested in singing and has been unmotivated by therapy, possibly due to its repetitive nature. He wondered if this might be a way to…

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