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From: Ken Logan
Date: 17 Apr 2010
Time: 10:13:56 -0500
Remote Name: 98.70.55.141
I think you raise an excellent question. I think about it like this: The end goal for these rate management strategies is to attain natural sounding speech, while simultaneously reducing the symptoms of cluttering (e.g., unintelligible speech, disfluent speech, disorganized language output). For that to happen, the person has to get to the point where s/he can self-monitor speech production for extended periods of time. Why, then, would an SLP want promote all the detailed rate practice that I describe in my article? Why not just go straight to a "monitor your speech when you talk" strategy? Well, you could try that, but I think the articulation rate training has value in that the person may sometimes have to reduce articulation rate while talking in order to produce certain multi-syllable words intelligibly (i.e., the "self-monitoring at normal rate" strategy may not be sufficient). Also, the act of learning the various rate management strategies requires self-monitoring, so it's a good way to help patients see the specific things that self-monitoring involves.