Sound Placement Brochures

These brochures were created through the collaboration of attendees at the Fort Hays State University Summer Workshop in Hays, KS in June 2008. Each brochure stipulates placement strategies to teach these later-developing sounds. It is critical to be well-versed in a variety of placement strategies for intervening with students who are nonstimulable for target sounds. (San Diego Unified's Speech Improvement Class is primarily for students who are nonstimulable. They are the ones who truly require intervention.) SLPs need as many "tricks" in their bags as possible. These brochures can be added to your bag of tricks for teaching the phonetically-complex, later-developing sounds that are advocated by the complexity approach (Gierut, 2007).

Readers are also directed to three excellent resources to support their practice in this area. No clinical office would be complete without these indispensable resources. Dr. Secord (2007) provides exhaustive strategies in the second edition of his book, Eliciting Sounds. These strategies target all sounds in English and special chapters address the challenges of treating the /r/ sound and remediating lisp patterns.

Dr. Bleile (2005) offers helpful lists and techniques to elicit the latest-developing sounds in his book, The Late Eight. Moreover, his book is accompanied by a CD with all of the featured information for ease of use.

Bauman-Waengler (2007) authored the text, Articulatory and Phonological Impairments: A Clinical Focus. In particular, she presents a chapter on phonetic placement strategies.