Phonological Treatment

Phonological treatment is often recommended for preschool and school-age children diagnosed with a phonological disorder. Phonological disorders result in reduced consonantal inventories that impact a child’s speech intelligibility. A majority of these children have a disorder severe enough to require phonological treatment to improve sound productions and promote more intelligible speech. Treatment usually introduces a treatment target(s) in a specific context (i.e., word position) in words in a range of perception and production activities. The goal is to establish accurate productions in the treatment stimuli as a means of promoting a transfer of learning to other untreated words, contexts, and untreated target sounds that are also produced in error. This transfer of learning is referred to as generalization. Three types of generalization are of interest ...