Don't Skip Varied Prosody

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab. A question came in last week about having to vary prosody: "I'm working through the DTTC hierarchy, and my kiddo's doing great, but they're reluctant to vary prosody, and I know they could go to the next level. Can I skip this part and just go to the next level?" And the answer is no.

One of the things we know about pediatric motor speech therapy is that we are using the principles of motor learning, and one of those principles is variability of practice. You may have caught an earlier video where I talked about variability of practice when using a modified block approach. It also applies to targeting prosody.

And here's why prosody is so incredibly important. I've been a therapist in this field for two and a half decades. Way before we were talking about principles of motor learning, we weren't varying prosody. What we saw then was that the child would start to talk in words and phrases, and it was amazing and we were so excited, but the prosody was off. That became a big challenge, because we would have to go back and teach stress and suprasegmental features. And in many instances, clarity was off when the prosody was off. So we don't want to leave this for last.

Lastly, I want to give you this visual. If we are helping a child with a motor plan, do you want a dirt road for that plan, or would you rather have a six-lane highway? That way they can access the variability of how to produce the target in different social circumstances, the way they would want to. So they're able to say "mom" happy, or angry, or sad. That's important.