Sprinkling In Spontaneous Productions

Full transcript

Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab coming in with a quick Monday tidbit. Today I thought I'd talk about what you do when you get to spontaneous production using the DTTC technique.

We know we start with simultaneous, move on to direct imitation, and then do delayed imitation, and we also vary prosody at each level. Ultimately, we get to spontaneous production.

What I do is, while I'm working on the target words, I've thoughtfully set up different contexts ahead of time in which I know I'm going to try to elicit them. For instance, the target word is "bye": "What did you say to Daddy before you came into the therapy room to work with me?" "Bye." Or the target word is "pajamas": "What do you put on at night before you go to sleep?" "Pajamas."

One of the target words right now is "pie," and I've been telling the little girl I've been working with that I just love to eat pie. So now that this word is in spontaneous, I'll say, "What do I love to eat?" And of course, she says "pie," beautifully.

Then what do we do? We sprinkle. We like to call them sprinkles in the NYU lab: we sprinkle in these target productions. We could do it before a block, or we could do it after a block. We're trying to get 10 of these target productions in one session, and if we get them across three sessions, so 30 productions that sound really good, then we're golden.