A qualitative retrospective study of multiple oppositions as an intervention option for children who are moderately to severely unintelligible

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to address the following questions about children who are moderately to severely unintelligible subsequent to a semester of treatment in multiple oppositions therapy: (1) Do the trained collapses in their phonetic inventories shrink; (2) Do the untrained collapses in their phonetic inventories shrink, as demonstrated by (a) generalization beyond targeted positions to other positions of sounds in words and/or (b) generalization beyond targeted sounds/features to other sounds/features in their phonetic inventories? Retrospective clinical data was used to conduct a study including a detailed analysis of gathered clinical data on four participants. Following one semester of multiple oppositions intervention, trained and untrained collapses in all participants? phonetic inventories shrunk. Participants also demonstrated positional and sound generalization to untrained sounds. In addition, improvements on trained and untrained probes from pre-treatment to post-treatment further validate a multiple oppositions approach to intervention for highly unintelligible children.