Carys Jenkins, Speech and Language Therapist at Skybound Autism Therapies, is one of only three speech therapists in the UK who have completed PROMPT Level 2. PROMPT is a technique to develop speech that we have found to be very beneficial within our practise here at Skybound. Here Carys reviews the latest research study demonstrating the effectiveness of PROMPT.
Multi-sensory Treatment for Children with Developmental Speech Disorders
Square, P; Namasivayam, A; Bose, A; Goshulak, D & Hayden D (2014)
A multisensory approach has long been recommended for children with motor speech disorders, however data on this is limited and there is a need for further research within this field. Two of the questions within this research project are whether PROMPT is effective in establishing appropriate speech movements in children with speech disorders and whether the treated speech movements generalisd to untreated words.
Five children between 4;0 and 4;9, each with a severe speech disorder were chosen as participants and they took part in 30 sessions which were 90minutes long. These sessions included 3-4 minutes of intensive practice of the treated lexicons, with the remaining session time taking part in arts and crafts and storytelling activities which included the treated lexicons. Prompts were provided as when needed during these activities. All of the children were also encouraged to practice these lexicons (words) at home. Every child practiced each target word on an average of about 30-40 times per session.
The results indicated that the application of PROMPT did result in an improvement of speech movements and that therapy did indeed generalise to untreated words. This was evident from the graphs displayed within the study which clearly showed correspondence between the improvement of treated words and the untreated words.