Here's a Great Tool for Articulation Therapy: Speech Motor Chaining

Speech Motor Chaining is an evidence-based articulation therapy approach, and my students actually like it! Here's how I got started.

(Please note that I am NOT being paid to recommend products. I am just a real SLP, trying to do the best I can for my students!)

I first heard about Speech Motor Chaining (SMC) when I attended a webinar for articulation therapy for /r/ several years ago. SMC was developed by Jonathan Preston and his team at Syracuse University. I've recently started using it more and more with my articulation students, and it does seem like a faster way to get some of my students to progress.

SMC is an evidence-based articulation therapy approach for school-age children (ages 6 and up) with speech sound disorders (SSDs), including apraxia. It's different from traditional articulation therapy approaches in that it prioritizes and expedites the progression from target sounds in syllables to complex sequences in phrases and sentences.

As you may have read previously, articulation therapy is all about dose and frequency. SMC allows for a high dose (number of trials per session), and I think it's well-suited for both the Quick Articulation! delivery model, as well as teletherapy.

SMC distinguishes between skill acquisition, described as the temporary improvements kids make on their target sounds during structured practice in therapy sessions, and skill learning, which refers to the more permanent changes that occur as a result of therapy, including retaining and generalizing the new target sound(s). I don't know about you, but I find that transition from skill acquisition to skill learning to be especially challenging for many students! So I welcome anything evidence-based that can facilitate that transition. SMC was developed to support both skill acquisition and skill learning, and has a specific structure that needs to be adhered to, which I will now outline.

While I strongly encourage you to read the 10-page tutorial (https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_LSHSS-18-0081), I'm going to break down the main elements for you here.

Here are the steps to implement Speech Motor Chaining in your articulation therapy (with links to helpful resources):

Target Selection for Speech Motor Chaining:

1. Provide a detailed articulation assessment, as you would for any artic case. In addition, "deep testing" is recommended. This is where speech sounds are assessed in various phonetic contexts. (This makes me think mostly of /r/ assessment/elicitation, where we often do some digging to see if there's a blend, preceding vowel, or other context that influences their success in producing the sound.)

2. Choose your therapy targets. Targets should be sounds the child produces with less than 50% accuracy in a particular syllable position at the word level. Two targets should be chosen per session. When choosing targets, I think we should also keep the complexity approach in mind; I like that SMC allows us the freedom to incorporate these principles!

3. You can then choose four variants, or sound sequences, per target. For example, if one of your target sounds is /s/ in the onset position, your four variants could be /si/, /so/, /sk/, and /sn/. This free spreadsheet contains guidelines for making chains and sample chains for each sound (scroll to find the guidelines and sound targets tabs).

   
   

   

Prepractice for Speech Motor Chaining

The first step in prepractice is elicitation. You know the drill, my fellow SLPs! For some ideas re: elicitation of different speech sounds, see my blog post for s, my blog post for r, and my blog post for sh (and ch). I really like the SAILS app to help my students hear their target sounds more clearly. Be sure to provide your students with frequent cueing and immediate, detailed feedback. The prepractice phase is complete when the child can produce at least three correct productions of each variant.

Structured Practice with Speech Motor Chaining

You can now begin speech motor chaining! To do this, you can follow the sequence on this free spreadsheet from the team at Syracuse University, OR you can get a membership to the SpeechLink website. I currently pay $5 per month for this because it streamlines everything. This page also has videos that bring you through treatment with SMC and how to use the datasheet to track progress.

Speech Motor Chaining involves bringing the student through 5 levels of increasing complexity: syllables, monosyllabic words, multisyllabic words, phrases, and self-generated sentences.

In order for the student to progress to the next level, they need to produce their target sound correctly in at least 5 out of six attempts at the current level. If they don't achieve this, proceed to the first level of the next chain with a different variant. A chain is mastered when the student progresses through all five levels on two separate occasions.

Feedback During Speech Motor Chaining

Feedback is a crucial element of SMC, and there are three distinct types: Knowledge of Performance (KP), Knowledge of Results (KR), and Self-Monitoring. KP includes specific comments about movement or placement of the articulators (e.g., "You kept your tongue behind your teeth"). KP is used most heavily in the skill acquisition stage. KR is feedback solely on correctness (e.g., "Correct"), and is used more heavily in the skill learning stage. Self-monitoring is required throughout the progression of SMC; the student must rate their own productions before any feedback is given to them for 3 out of the six trials.

If you try SMC, I'd love for you to leave a comment about how it went!

And if you need any research-based therapy materials...

LEVEL UP YOUR SPEECH LANGUAGE THERAPY ACTIVITIES WITH STORYWHYS

Did you find this blog post helpful? Subscribe below to get the latest blog posts, which feature lots of speech therapy ideas for busy SLPs who want to provide fun, impactful, and meaningful speech-language therapy.

StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy, and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.

Did you know book companions can be among the best speech therapy materials for elementary students? Explore all of the StoryWhys book companions for speech therapy in my store. You'll find comprehensive book companions that target many different language skills or Spotlight Series book companions that focus on one type of skill, all using high-quality, beloved storybooks.

For quick videos to help you get the most from StoryWhys book companions, check out the YouTube channel here.

And get a FREE, 71-page book companion for speech therapy on the free downloads page.

Enjoy!