How Many Productions Should You Get in a Session?

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab, and I'm going to address a question we get frequently here at the Motor Speech Lab: how many repetitions should we typically see in a speech therapy session for a child diagnosed with apraxia?

We know with this type of treatment that repetition is key. I know the buzz is that we need a minimum of 100 productions. What we really want to stress is that while we do want a lot of productions, the most important thing is the quality.

Remember, we've talked about this a lot over the past couple of weeks: conscious practice is key. "If it's not going through the cortex, there isn't any learning." That's a direct quote from Dr. Strand. So if they're on autopilot with their productions, and you're just clicking away counting them, those don't count. Honestly, I've gotten used to telling the kids when they get like that, "No, it doesn't count. I really need you to be paying attention and focused on how your mouth is moving and how it feels when you say that target."

I can tell you that we get, on average, somewhere between 200 and 350 productions per 45-minute session here in the research we're doing, and I've had more. I think 450 is one of our higher numbers. And I've had some kids who have done 60 or 75, but they were really focused when we were doing them, and we were dealing with some challenging behavior. I was happy with that number too, because of the quality of the practice.

So again, just to stress and underscore: it doesn't really matter about the number, although we want as many as we can get. We want quality over quantity every time.

I hope that's been helpful.