By Pam Marshalla
Q: You said something in a class recently that I did not write down, and I wish I had. It was about the relationships between oral motor, phonemes, and phonology in therapy. Can you repeat it here? I think you are referring to this statement: Movements create the phonemes that are used in phonological patterns to express the language for use in conversation and literacy.
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I heard you say that Van Riper was your greatest hero of all time in the profession, but then you said you had others that you didn’t mention. Who else do you admire in the field? What an interesting question! Okay, here are the people that have been the most influential to me, presented in categories that are the most important to my work. Articulation The one-and-only Charles Van Riper wins this top place of honor because he is…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I still don’t get how to explain the difference between “articulation” and “phonology” and “oral motor.” Can you take a run at that again? I think my last answer to this was way too involved. Here is the short and sweet of it using phoneme M as an example in a very simplified way: Articulation ARTICULATION concerns the mechanics of sound production: The position assumed by the jaw, lips, tongue, and velum during production of a phoneme. For example, the…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have a preschool client who talks with his mouth closed. He can imitate me when I model an open mouth posture, but he always closes it when he says a word. I know that he is struggling with motor planning, but I just don’t know where to go from here. Any advice? This client can open his mouth, meaning that the mechanics are good. He also can imitate the posture, meaning that he has control over this movement….
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My school district has been suggesting that we work on stopping before s-clusters, and I thought that would be a mistake leading to lots of frustration for both the SLPs and the students. Do you have any comments? I think that whenever we set policy –– “my district has been suggesting that we work on stopping before s-clusters” –– we are forgetting the individual child. There is no hierarchy or policy that should “work.” What “works” is what works…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: When my 4-year-old client says a word that begins with a vowel, he adds /h/ before it –– “Ate” sounds like “Hate.” What are your thoughts? Let me answer this according to four different scenarios –– 1. Client generally uses no frication at all: If the client was not yet using any fricatives or affricates, and the extra appearances of H were just a fluke, then I would stimulate all eleven sounds for a while till the whole set…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: In my therapy with kids who have the stopping process, I typically start with S-clusters and S in the postvocalic position. It seems they develop the idea of “fricative-ness” more easily this way and, from there, they more easily go on to prevocalic S. I find that starting with prevocalic S often leads to a lot of frustration because they learn “sock” as “stock,” and so forth. Can you comment on this? First, we have such a mess in…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: My client is beginning to use S-blends, but she does so with an interdental lisp. Do I treat the phonological process first and let her lisp, or treat the lisp first and then the process? Or should I do both concurrently? I am worried about reinforcing the lisp. I would work on the phonology first to stimulate the use of the phoneme within the language. Then I would address place of articulation. That’s the way I would organize it…
By Pam Marshalla
Q: I have a six-year-old male client that has phonological and articulation problems. What should I target first in therapy? Therapy always is based on the differential diagnosis. It is impossible to answer that question without information about the client’s entire phonological and articulation repertoire. Selection of therapy targets will be very different depending upon many factors. One makes decisions about therapy based upon a complete overview of what is going on. If you read through this blog, you will…
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…
