Purpose: The purpose of this clinical focus article is to summarize 1 possible process that a clinician might follow in designing and conducting a treatment program with John, a 14-year-old male individual who stutters. Method: The available research evidence, practitioner experience, and consideration of individual preferences are combined to…

A mindfulness meditation exercise was incorporated into a stuttering treatment program for an adult male who stutters. Speech disfluencies were analyzed before and after mindfulness meditation and implementation of fluency shaping techniques. Findings suggested that including a mindfulness meditation exercise into a treatment program may be…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the controversial topic of stuttering in preschool children and how to evaluate the options for treatment, emphasizing the role of external research evidence. Method: A hypothetical but realistic case study of a 3-year-old boy who stutters is described. Two contrasting approaches to treatment are…

Background: Posterior nasal fricatives are a learned compensatory articulation error and commonly substituted for oral fricatives. Treatment of such articulation errors requires the modification or teaching of skilled movements. A motor-based approach is designed to teach the complex motor skill movement sequences required in the production of…

Intervention with children with speech and language difficulties has been proven beneficial compared with no treatment yet, knowing what type of intervention to provide remains a challenge. Studies of English-speaking children indicate that intervention targeting the production of morphological targets may have a positive effect on phonological…

The goals of the present study were to (1) examine the effects of the multiple opposition phonological approach on improving phoneme production accuracy in children with severe phonological disorders and (2) explore whether the multiple opposition approach is feasible for the telepractice service delivery model. A multiple-baseline,…

Children with limited oral language due to developmental and language delays have difficulty with communication in their everyday lives. Their trouble with speech and/or language impacts their ability to socialize with peers and learn in the school setting. Most of the research on alternative and augmentative communication systems and oral…

An adolescent with a persistent frontal lisp participated in a two-part 11-session intervention case study. The first phase used ultrasound imagery and acoustic, phonetic and voice education to provide information about articulatory setting (AS) and general awareness of the speech production process. The second phase used traditional articulation…

Swedish has a complicated prosodic system, compared, for example, with English. A large proportion of Swedish children with language impairment (LI) have prosodic problems to some extent. There are few descriptions in the literature of prosody intervention, which means that clinicians must rely on their overall linguistic and therapeutic knowledge…

Background: School-aged children with persisting speech sound disorders (SSDs) may show little improvement in speech accuracy following phonological or articulation therapy. Aims: To determine the effects of establishing consonant production in facilitative vowel contexts for a 7-year-old boy (CD) with persisting post-alveolar fronting. CD had…

Children with unintelligible speech differ in severity, underlying deficit, type of surface error patterns and response to treatment. Detailed treatment case studies, evaluating specific intervention protocols for particular diagnostic groups, can identify best practice for children with speech disorder. Three treatment case studies evaluated the…

Jaw movement patterns were examined longitudinally in a 3-year-old male with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and compared with a typically developing control group. The child with CAS was followed for 8 months, until he began accurately and consistently producing the bilabial phonemes /p/, /b/, and /m/. A movement tracking system was used to…

Background: There is a significant body of evidence documenting the speech and language abnormalities found in adult psychiatric disorders. These speech and language impairments can create additional social barriers for the individual and may hinder effective communication in psychiatric treatment and management. However, the role of speech and…

This study investigated changes in the speech patterns of young adult male subjects when stuttering was modified by deliberately prolonging speech. Three subjects showed clinically significant stuttering reductions when using prolonged speech to reduce their stuttering. Resulting speech was perceptually stutter free. Acoustic and…

This study evaluated whether variations in the structure of minimal versus maximal opposition treatments would result in empirical differences in phonological learning with three four-year-old boys who excluded at least six sounds from their phonetic and phonemic inventories. Results indicated that treatment of maximal oppositions led to greater…