Major focus area

Speech Therapy -> Phonology

Short description

Distinctive feature approach is used by the SLP after a distinctive feature analysis of the patient’s speech errors is completed. The goal of the approach is to establish missing distinctive features and assumes that teaching a feature in the context of a few sounds will result in generalized production of other sounds with the same feature. Distinctive features are place, manner, and voicing of sounds (McReynolds & Bennett, 1972; Pena-Brooks & Hegde, 2007, Costello & Onstein, 1976, Ruder & Bunce, 1981).

Long description

Distinctive feature approach is used by the SLP after a distinctive feature analysis of the patient’s speech errors is completed. The goal of the approach is to establish missing distinctive features and assumes that teaching a feature in the context of a few sounds will result in generalized production of other sounds with the same feature. Distinctive features are place, manner, and voicing of sounds. Distinctive features are place, manner, and voicing of sounds. After completing a distinctive feature analysis the SLP selects a specific distinctive feature.

For example: a patient might make the following errors: pan/fan, base/vase, toap/soap and tun/sun. The target sounds for which the patient substituted other sounds all share a common feature: stridency. The SLP might begin by teaching /f/ in hopes that the feature of stridency would generalize to /v/ and /s/ without direct training of /v/ and /s/. SLPs use DFA to try to find the patient’s underlying patters and then train one or several sounds in that pattern. SLP can use minimal pair words. More research is needed to fully support the DFA; currently, it is not widely used by SLPs (McReynolds & Bennett, 1972; Pena-Brooks & Hegde, 2007, Costello & Onstein, 1976, Ruder & Bunce, 1981).