The second semester is almost halfway over already! I can not believe how quickly grad school is going. My new client this semester, T, is a VERY cute 3 year old with delayed speech and language. Last semester his goals were mostly focused on language: WH questions, yes/no questions, increasing MLU, etc. Apparently, he had a huge language "growth spurt" over the last several months, and his MLU seems to be right on target now. He still has some trouble with WH questions, especially "when" and "how." Right now I give him two choices while working on those questions, and he seems to be improving.
T's main problem, in my opinion, is not his language but his speech. He demonstrates everything that Dr. Ruscello taught us were red flags: initial consonant deletion, glottal stopping, and the occasional backing of sounds. He is stimulable for almost every sound, but his phonological rules are incomplete. For example: Last week we were working on the initial /p/ in /pIg/, and he would say /p....p....kIg/. I read a book of rhyming words to him (AKA minimal pairs), and this week I am going to include many more minimal pairs in the sessions. My goal is to teach him that he needs to make his sounds in the right places for people to understand him (Geirut, 1998). The challenge will be keeping his attention and finding fun activities to do while motivating him to improve his speech. He is extremely active and loves to change tasks often before we are really finished!
Reference:
Geirut, Judith A (1998). Treatment efficacy: Functional phonological disorders in children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41 (S85-S100).
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