March 2, 2023 · 1:27 · Target selection
Choosing Target Words Takes Time and Trial and Error
For kids who struggle most with longer syllable shapes and spontaneous speech, the lab tests many multisyllabic words to find exactly where a child breaks down before picking targets.
Full transcript
Nicole, coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. I wanted to continue talking about how we pick target goals for our research participants here in our lab. We just posted a couple of slides of our doctoral student, Emily Wong, writing on a whiteboard as she considered possible targets for her new participant.
One of the things we wanted to impress upon you is that with the kids who are more impacted at the longer syllable shapes and in spontaneous output, we take a long time. There's a lot of consideration that goes into what their words can be, and quite honestly, a lot of trial and error.
Just to give you an example, one of the kids I'm seeing has these target words: "edible," "go fish," "magician," "pajama" or "pajamas," and "big snowman." How did we come upon those words? It took a while. He did fairly well on the DEMSS. But what we did was test a lot of multisyllabic words to see exactly where his breakdown was, because we wanted to really meet him at his learning level. And that was the biggest, most profound impact.
