Choosing an effective and efficient phonological treatment approach is an important decision for clinicians when treating children with phonological deviations. Current research supports the effectiveness of phonological treatment, but few studies have compared two approaches. More comparative studies are essential to support clinical intervention for children who are highly unintelligible. This single-subject study was designed to compare the effectiveness of two phonologically-based treatment approaches in facilitating an intelligible speech production system for one highly unintelligible preschool female. Multiple baselines across behaviors with an alternating treatment design were used in this descriptive study. This study sought to answer the following questions: (a) Is there a clinically significant difference between the effectiveness of the cycling approach and the minimal pairs approach in treating a child with phonological disorders? and (b) Do the phonological cycling and/or the minimal pairs treatment approaches result in generalization of treated sounds in a targeted pattern to untrained words containing the treated sounds and to untreated sounds/sound contexts in the same phonological pattern? Using the phonological assessment instrument, the APP-R in conjunction with the CAPD, four phonological deviations were chosen for phonological remediation. Two deviations were assigned to the phonological cycling approach (Hodson & Paden, 1991) and two to the minimal pairs approach (Blache, 1989; Fokes, 1982). Remediation alternated between the two approaches every 6 sessions, beginning with the cycling approach, for a total of 24 sessions. Treated sounds from each targeted deviation were taught and reassessed using the APP-R to compare treatment effectiveness. To examine generalization of targeted phonological patterns to phonemes in other contexts, periodic probes of treated sounds within untrained words and untreated sounds/sound contexts in the same pattern were administered. Results of the CAPD indicate that both treatment methods were effective in improving some of the treated phonological deviations for this subject though neither method was more effective than the other. Probe words indicated generalization to untrained words and untreated sounds/sound contexts in some phonological patterns. These findings support the phonologically-based theory of remediation: the goal of phonological treatment is developing a whole phonological system, rather than perfecting targeted deviations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-6356 |
| Date | 08 July 1996 |
| Creators | Kemper, Katherine Vaughan |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
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