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The Use of Prompts and Precision Teaching to Address Speech Sound Disorders in a 17-Year-Old Girl With Autism

  • Precision Teaching: Discoveries and Applications
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Abstract

Precision teaching is a measurement system that uses frequency as its basic data and plots those data on a standard celeration chart for practitioners to make decisions (Maloney, 1998). Kay, a 17-year-old girl with autism spectrum disorder and profound speech sound disorder, participated in this multiple-baseline across-behaviors study. The syllables “thu,” “fu,” and “cu” were targeted for higher frequencies of correct echoic responding in isolation. Lip-tongue-teeth position prompts, frequency building (Fabrizio & Moors, 2003, European Journal of Behavior Analysis, 4(1–2), 23–36), and feedback were used in brief timed practice trials for the first 2 skills. Priming (Cihon et al., 2017) was also added to the third syllable. The frequency of correct responses accelerated from low levels in baseline to a frequency aim of 60 per minute or higher, with intervention for all 3 targets. The accuracy of her articulation with 30 functional words with the component consonant sounds was measured and showed significant improvements from baseline to postintervention. The outcomes representing fluent performance were also achieved. The implications of training for fluency of syllables on word speech are discussed.

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Author Note

The contents of this article are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent official views of the organization they are affiliated with. We thank Dr. Kendra Newsome, Dr. Donny Newsome, and the staff at Fit Learning, Reno, Nevada, for training the authors in precision-teaching procedures and standard celeration charting. We thank Dr. Rick Kubina for reviewing an earlier version of the manuscript and for his help with several queries on the concept and with enriching the analysis. We thank the reviewers for incisive comments and new perspectives and for their detailed notes on certain errors in the overall presentation. We thank Ms. Rupini Gowda for implementing the protocols diligently and Mr. B. G. Sanjeevi for his help with illustrations.

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  1. Behavior Momentum India, 407, 7th Main, 80 ft. Road, HRBR Layout, Bangalore, 560043, India

    Sridhar Aravamudhan & Smita Awasthi

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  1. Sridhar Aravamudhan
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  2. Smita Awasthi
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Correspondence to Smita Awasthi.

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All procedures performed in this study involving a human participant were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Informed consent was obtained from the parents of the child with ASD who participated in this study.

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Aravamudhan, S., Awasthi, S. The Use of Prompts and Precision Teaching to Address Speech Sound Disorders in a 17-Year-Old Girl With Autism. Behav Analysis Practice 14, 644–659 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00470-7

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