Some Techniques To Help Improve Speech Apraxia in Kids

Some Techniques to Help Improve Speech Apraxia in Kids

Children with speech apraxia have difficulty producing the timing sequences required to construct speech. This is a motor speech disorder that is not because of weak speech muscles. A treatment plan for speech apraxia should be based on the disorder’s nature, along with the individual strengths and needs of the child. Here are some techniques that have shown success in teaching speech impairments among kids.

Remember that when you individualize a treatment plan according to the needs and strengths of your child, you will end up with better results than just following best practices. Treatment techniques that include motor learning skills can be used to elicit the right speech movement gestures. But there are more specialized approaches that have been modified for kids with speech apraxia that incorporate the principles of speech motor learning. Most of these techniques are combined with traditional speech therapy techniques like...

Multi-Sensory Cueing Techniques: These techniques use various sensory cues to help the child see, hear, feel and understand the targeted speech movement gestures requested of them as they practice their words or phrases.

Integral Stimulation Techniques: These approaches use a structured and well-defined hierarchy of speech targets, requiring the child to imitate utterances modeled by the clinician. In this technique, the auditory attention of the child is focused on listening to the words, while his visual attention is on looking at the face of the clinician. Overtime, the clinician varies the timing of the repetition, eventually working toward the self-initiated correct pronunciation for the child.

Progressive Approximation and Shaping Techniques: These techniques use speech production that the child is currently able to produce, and then attempts to shape the movement gestures of the child into closer approximations of the targeted word. This is done through different forms of practice and feedback.

Phonetic Placement Techniques: These techniques give verbal instruction and information to the child on what to physically do with their lips, mouth, tongue and jaw to achieve a more accurate articulate position for certain sounds that they find hard to produce. Take note, though, that the primary focus of this therapy is on speech movement sequences.

Tactile Facilitation Approaches: These approaches use manipulation or touch of the face, lips, jaw and head during speech production to allow the child to feel and remember how to properly move their articulators to create the speech movements. Usually, assistance is given at first and is slowly weaned off as the child gains independence in making the speech movements.

Gestural Cueing: This approach is great speech therapy for apraxia and makes use of hand cueing to represent the target movements and shapes of the articulators.

Prosodic Facilitation: This technique involves melody and rhythm to give rhythmic or timing structure in which speech movements can be achieved.

Different variations of these techniques are combined to treat a kid with speech apraxia. A qualified speech therapist in Somerset County will combine his knowledge on speech apraxia and his knowledge of the individual child to design an individualized treatment plan. Whatever approach the speech pathologist in NJ takes, he has to describe to the parent why a particular approach is chosen for the child based on the disorder’s nature and the child’s unique needs and strengths.