Three Ways to Add Variability of Practice

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab, coming in with a very quick tip on how to bring more variability into your motor speech sessions. We know variability is one of the principles of motor learning. Speech is a motor act, and that's why we borrow from the principles of motor learning to organize our sessions. But what does it look like to actually carry out variability of practice?

The first thing to think about is your stimuli. You'll have different syllable shapes. What does that mean? Maybe you have a VC word like "up," a CVC, or a CV. Maybe you have a CVCV. If the child has more skill, maybe it's a more complicated word or a short phrase. But within one session, you have varying syllable shapes.

The second thing to think about is organizing your session with what we call a modified block approach. You work on these targets in blocks of repetitive practice, and you vary the blocks. One block might be 15 to 20 or more productions, and the next might be five to 10. I usually do the shorter blocks with the targets that are more challenging, where the child maybe isn't as gung-ho about the word. When I organize my sessions, those get the shorter blocks.

Lastly, we want to make sure we are always varying prosody. We want these children to be able to say these words in a range of different ways: happy, angry, mad, sad. Can they say it in a whisper? I always tell my grad students: if you're going to lay down a motor plan, do you want a dirt road or a six-lane highway? You want the variability of being able to say the word in different ways.

I hope that's helpful.