A preliminary investigation of the efficacy of oral motor exercises for children with mild articulation disorders

Abstract

Although oral motor therapy is sometimes used to treat articulation disorders in school-age children, several reports question its efficacy. In this case study, four first-grade students, two boys and two girls, received 15 half-hour sessions of oral motor treatment based on Easy Does it for Articulation: An Oral Motor Approach (Strode and Chamberlain,1997). Pre- and post-test measures of the children's articulation indicated no real differences in speech production. These results question the efficacy of general and discrete oral motor exercises because they did not enhance the children's speech production.