January 23, 2023 · 1:31 · Making the shift · Cueing · Target selection
Don't Segment Multisyllabic Words
When teaching a multisyllabic target, don't break it into separate syllables or phonemes; slow it down by elongating the vowels and say it together, because children learn in gestures and whole words.
Full transcript
Nicole here, coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab with your Monday tidbit on today, January 30th. I wanted to talk a little bit about multisyllabic words as target words in your motor speech therapy, which you're going to use because you're going to want to target these more complex movement gestures.
What you don't want to do is segment the syllables. Take my favorite word, "banana." We don't want to say "ba... na... na" when we're first teaching this target word. We don't learn the word that way. We don't say the word that way. We would only be doing a disservice to our client.
What do we do? We slow down: "Baaa-naaa-naaa." That's slowing down. What am I really doing? I'm elongating the vowel. I'm also using simultaneous production at this stage, which is really incredibly helpful. You could do this with any multisyllabic word: "Aaa-niii-maaal." And then eventually you want to get to regular-rate simultaneous, or have them doing it with you.
To note also: you don't want to break down a single word. You do not want to break down the phonemes. It's not "c... a... t." It's "cat." Our children learn in gestures, or in words. Chunks.
