Concurrent Treatment

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The purpose of Application of a Motor Learning Treatment for Speech Sound Disorders in Small Groups was to evaluate the effectiveness of motor-learning based therapy, also called Concurrent Treatment, within groups of up to four elementary public school students with disordered articulation, normal language, and normal hearing. The authors of this paper recognized that while many studies have been done to determine the efficacy of students in individualized therapy settings, few studies had been done to look at therapy within small groups. Therefore, the researchers tested twenty-eight 6-9 year old children within a small group using Concurrent Treatment. The children were able to acquire their targeted speech sounds within 40 30-minute sessions (20 hours over 20 weeks). Concurrent Treatment is different than traditional therapy for a speech sound disorder or articulation disorder. Instead of targeting speech sounds in order of complexity from syllable to word to phrase to sentence and so on, Concurrent Treatment bypasses the need for these steps and targets speech sounds with all of these things in a random order every session. In previous studies, Skelton (2004), …show more content…

Establishment consisted of teaching the children correct placement of articulators to produce the targeted speech sound across all word positions. The randomized-variable practice began once the child could produce the sound 80% of the time in certain syllables. It usually took children 1-5 sessions to complete the establishment phase. Random teaching tasks such as imitated single syllables, imitated single words, nonimitated single words, imitated two-to-four word phrases, nonimitated two-to-four word phrases, imitated sentences, nonimitated sentences, and storytelling or conversations were selected in the second phase. Participants remained in this phase until they obtained 80% mastery across two

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