The Difference Between Articulation and Phonological Therapy
Hey SLP 👋🏼
What keeps you up at night?
Finances?
Childcare?
The difference between an articulation and phonological approach?
Well, I can't help with the first two, but let's chat a bit about the third!
But what's the difference? 🤨
As professionals in our field, this is a crucial piece of information for us to know when we implement therapy plans. It can make a huge difference in the success we see in our path to meeting those goals!
Let's talk about
👉🏼 ARTICULATION THERAPY 👈🏼
WHAT IT'S USED FOR:
- Clients that demonstrate difficulty with isolated sounds and phonemes
- Keep in mind -- children can have more than one articulation error and can also have articulation errors in addition to phonological processes!
THE APPROACH:
- Teach the sound in isolation then move through phrases of isolation, words, phrases/sentences, conversation, then generalization
Let's talk about:
👉🏼 PHONOLOGICAL THERAPY
👈🏼
WHAT IT'S USED FOR:
- Clients that demonstrated difficulty with phonological processes or difficulty with entire classes of sounds beyond the age range of 3-5. These children are typically very hard to understand due to the wide range of their errors.
THE APPROACH (just one way!):
- Use minimal pairs to teach the child the difference between a correct production and their error
- Once auditory discrimination is firmly established, you can work through the levels of sound production from words up to unstructured conversation
👉🏼 THE DIFFERENCE 👈🏼
Phonological processes often indicate that the child may struggle with language concepts later on (such as reading, spelling, and phonological awareness), since their whole understanding of entire sound classes is distorted. Therefore, it's important to make that distinction and teach the phonological rules of each class of sounds and their characteristics to give the child a good background knowledge prior to addressing the motor aspect of producing sounds.
Knowing the difference of these two types of therapies is crucial for every SLP to know so I hope this breakdown makes understanding them simple!
Still have questions? Drop them in the comments below and let me know 👇🏼
Happy Speeching!
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