What Are the Main Goals of the Prompt Therapy Approach?

PROMPT stands for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets

 

PROMPT therapy is a technique that can be used to treat a variety of speech delays and disorders. PROMPT is particularly helpful in the treatment of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). Children diagnosed with CAS often lack planning and coordination of the articulators, which aids in producing intelligible speech. Most children who have CAS have a big gap in their receptive vs expressive language scores (receptive language skills typically much higher than expressive language). Children may recognize the word and understand what it means, but often have trouble recreating the sounds of the word independently. Introducing tactile prompts can be helpful in developing motor control and proper oral muscular movements, while also eliminating any unnecessary muscle movements.

 

A PROMPT trained SLP (Speech-Language Pathologist) uses tactile (touch) cues to a patient’s articulators (jaw, tongue, lips) to manually guide them through a target (phoneme, syllable, word, phrase). Every phoneme of the English language has a tactile “prompt” that will aid in eliciting the specific sound. Phonemes include all vowels (ah, oh, ee), diphthongs (ay, ie), and consonants (b, m, sh, th, r). Different levels of PROMPT technique include Parameter, Surface, Complex, and Syllable prompts. Each of these levels are key components of treatment and can be applied to improve social interaction, language, and motor speech skills.

 

During PROMPT therapy sessions, children learn (through assistance and repetition) to plan, organize, and create increasingly more advanced speech sounds/combinations. They will not only see how a sound is made, they will also hear and FEEL exactly how that sound is produced with their articulators. Therapists often use repetition of sounds plus tactile cueing to encourage the patient to repeat the phoneme target multiple times. Over time, this helps to solidify the correct placement and builds muscle memory for the target sound/word. As a patient’s skills improve and correct motor plans are formed, the therapist will slowly decrease the quantity of tactile cues administered.

 

Each therapist will design a program that will not only help improve a child’s speech production, but it will also improve their turn-taking skills, vocabulary, and overall functional communication. If you think your child may benefit from a PROMPT treatment approach, please reach out to us at PediaSpeech Services! We would love to schedule your child with one of our PROMPT-certified Speech Language Pathologists!

 

You can check out the Prompt Institute for more information! https://promptinstitute.com