A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to
assess the effects of sound production treatment (SPT) with a speaker who had
chronic apraxia of speech and aphasia.
The speaker had participated in a previous investigation involving SPT
and had demonstrated clinically significant levels of overgeneralization of
trained sounds. In the present investigation, treatment was modified to attempt
to reduce unwanted overgeneralization. Three groups of sounds were trained
sequentially in the word-initial position:
Group 1: s, p, v; Group 2: k, sh, j, ; and Group 3: l, m, n. Treatment consisted of a combination of
repetition, production of minimally contrastive words, integral stimulation,
and phonetic placement cues, with treatment stimuli presented in a combination
of blocked and randomized trials. Treatment
effects were measured to trained words, to trained sounds in the word-final
position of untrained words, and to a sentence completion context. Results indicated positive acquisition
effects, limited generalization across word position and elicitation contexts,
and minimal overgeneralization.