Making the Shift: Think About the Whole Word, Not the Phoneme

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. Happy Apraxia Awareness Month. I wanted to start the month off by talking about making the shift: making the shift as a therapist into being a motor speech therapist.

That's not always an easy thing to do, especially if you're coming at it with a lot of experience. For me, one of the harder parts of making the shift was thinking about the word as a whole, and not thinking about the individual phonemes. Even in the way I gave feedback in the beginning, I was still thinking about those individual phonemes.

Let's take "me" as a target, or "mom." The planning for that initial M is really ruled by the vowel that follows it. So the M in "me" is different, and planned differently, than the M in "mom." You can even see it in how my mouth is shaped differently as I go into the rest of those words.

This really is the crux of picking words for motor speech treatment. And when you're giving feedback, you're not talking about specific phonemes; you're talking about how the mouth is moving, maybe how big the mouth is open, and not giving feedback about the M in particular.

It's not easy, and it took me a little time. But once you understand that we don't segment the word, that we're picking words to really work on the neural efficiency of the motor system, it gets easier with time.