A Treatment Program for Disordered Phonology

Abstract

A therapy program for disordered phonology was developed by identifying unique characteristics of a child's phonological patterns and by using recent literature in normal phonological development. The goal was consistent, automatic production of word-final [z] in conversational speech. The program was designed for a 4 year 11-month-old boy who had been enrolled in articulation therapy for two years. He had several consistent errors in single words but a significantly greater number of less consistent errors in conversational speech, which made him unintelligible. The therapy program controlled the phonetic contexts for [z] production, as utterances increased in length and became less structured. The child was successful in completing the program but only moderate improvement was made between pre- and post-therapy speech sampling. Analysis of the samples revealed that the errors were not related to phonetic context. However, the child omitted [z] in certain lexical items. The results suggest that the child's errors involved more than the ability to produce [z] in a variety of phonetic contexts. Other components of the linguistic system (syntax and semantics) appear to have interacted with the phonological component, resulting in difficulty in producing [z] in certain lexical items. The interface between the various linguistic components is discussed in terms of assessing phonological abilities and planning remediation programs.