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From: Carla Di Domenicantonio
Date: 26 Apr 2010
Time: 12:15:58 -0500
Remote Name: 69.157.26.68
Hi, Corrine, My previous reply did not post so I hope this one does! Thank you for your question. We initiated therapy by working on beaver talk first as it was the feature that bothered David the most. I prepared picture cards/words with bilabial sounds in them and threw in a few with labio-dental sounds as a challenge and for contrast. I prompted David on what his goal was for the activity and I gave feedback as he talked about the pictures/words. Once he was consistent, I had mom complete daily 10 minute sessions (as per the Lidcombe approach) and she provided feedback. Daily severity ratings were introduced at the first session. David went from ratings of 7 to ratings of 1. He bacame aware of his lip movements and would comment to his mother when he noticed he was in beaver talk mode. Once beaver talk was pretty much gone, we focussed on slowing down and the technique we chose together was pausing. We used an abacus initially to note the pauses as we conversed. The abacus was gradually removed and replaced by verbal and gestural feedback. David eventually paused on his own and his delivery slowed down as a consequence. Intelligibility also improved and the disfluencies disappeared so we had no reason to work on fluency. It's great when we influence a number of parameters by working on one, or two others!