Major focus area

Speech Therapy -> Phonology

Short description

Chaining therapy approach is a procedure used by the SLP to elicit consonants in pre, post, and intervocalic contexts using functional phrase combinations (Johnson & Hood, 1988).

Long description

Chaining therapy approach is a procedure used by the SLP to elicit consonants in pre, post, and intervocalic contexts using functional phrase combinations.

Chaining therapy approach was designed for unintelligible patients who persist in the use of open syllables (pick up = “pi uh” and wash it = “wa ih”. The approach attempts to achieve syllable closure and improve syllable shapes by linking syllables and/or words together using overlapping, coarticulatory ballistic movements. Emphasis is on teaching transitions between sounds rather than on teaching the specific sounds.

Example: “Wash out” teach as “wa-shout’ and show the patient a picture of “shout. “Wake up” teach as “we-cup” and show the patient a picture of “cup” (Johnson & Hood, 1988).

Reference links

• Tutorial: Speech Motor Chaining Treatment For School-Age Children With Speech Sound Disorders 0
  www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

  Author: Jonathan L. Preston, Megan C. Leece, and Jaclyn Stortoa - Operationalized treatments for school-age children with speech sound disorders may result in more replicable and evidence-based interventions. This tutorial describes Speech Motor Chaining (SMC) procedures, which are designed to build complex speech around core movements by incorporating several principles of motor learning. The procedures systematically manipulate factors such as feedback type and frequency, practice variability, and stimulus complexity based on the child’s performance.