Targeted speech sounds and their association to children’s grade level and therapy dosage

The purpose of this study was to understand which speech sounds are most commonly targeted in therapy, and how that target sound is associated with the child's grade and the dosage received within sessions. Dose is considered the number of times a speech sound is elicited in a single clinical session (e.g. 80 trials per session). We present data from 772 therapy sessions collected from 106 school-based speech-language pathologists, using the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). ESM is an approach to collecting data in situ during moments of specific interest. This investigation, specifically, examined relations between target sounds, grade level, and dosage. Our results indicate that /ɹ/ was the most commonly targeted speech sound. Targeting a sound within the category of early 13 sounds significantly predicted that a child is enrolled in a lower grade level. However, there was no significant association between target sound category and dosage.