By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am working with an adult who wants to reduce his accent. Do you have any material on this? I am not an expert in working with accents, although I have always had a secret desire to specialize in it. My professors called this “Dialect Reduction” but modern therapists call it “Code Switching.” The continuing ed classes on dialect reduction I have taken in recent years and the old books on elocution that I have read both indicate that…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I am faced with cutting my caseload down considerably due to budget cuts. We will see the more severe kids a max of one time per week, and that’s fine. However, we are being asked to cut the mild kids more, and even eliminate them from our caseloads. Do you have any ideas? Many therapists are facing this today. Here is a brainstorm I had that may get you thinking outside the box. The idea is to use four…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My preschool client backed all lingua-alveolars until I taught him D. But not — it is distorted (his tongue looks funny) and the other sounds aren’t coming. Help! Most kids with a restricting lingua frenum use what the elocutionists used to call “thick speech” meaning that it was speech produced without the tongue bowled. The tongue was humping, bulging, or what the researchers today would call arching upward. This is probably what your client is now doing on D,…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: Do you have any suggestions for slowing the rate of speech in an elementary school child? Rate is all about the number of syllables produced per unit of time. Therefore focus on syllables. This is what I do. I call it “Pencil Talking”–– The child and I each hold a pencil with a good eraser. We engage in general conversation, or we talk about speech. We tap our erasers on the table to mark each syllable as we talk….
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have an older client who can pass an articulation test but who is very hard to understand in connected speech. I heard you talk about “elocution” in one of your classes. Can you refer me to any written material on how to do this? A client who can pass an articulation test but who has problems with intelligibility usually is mildly dysarthric. Thus, they have mild problems with prosody (rate, rhythm, stress, intonation, pitch, tone, volume), vowel clarity,…
