I was very excited to learn that one of my former students has qualified for participation in a study at Haskins Laboratories at Yale, offering free ultrasound visual feedback lessons for children ages 10-14, with speech articulation problems with the /r/ sound. I assume these will be kids with persistent difficulty in producing /r/ and carrying it over. They will receive up to 16 speech therapy sessions using ultrasound to provide a video image of the tongue as the child talks. The child places the ultrasound beneath the chin. This generates a “real-time movie” of the tongue which can be used to help the child understand what is happening in the mouth when producing speech sounds. These images are used to cue the child to move the tongue to different positions and to make different tongue shapes to achieve a correct /r/.
I’ll keep you posted. I’m hoping to be able to watch a session. I think it has great promise for older kids that are “tired” of traditional therapy and need addition feedback. We’ll see.
