Oral Placement Therapy

ORAL PLACEMENT THERAPY (SARA ROSENFELD JOHNSON)

Oral Placement Therapy (OPT) is a type of oral-motor therapy used to target specific movements needed for speech clarity and feeding. It can be used with a variety of clients, including those with Down Syndrome. This therapy differs from traditional speech therapy in that the strategies continue to utilize auditory and visual stimuli (e.g. “listen, look, and do what I do”) while adding the tactile and proprioceptive sensory systems. This allows the client to feel the movements as well as hear and see them. It can be an important addition to traditional speech therapy - especially for those individuals with placement and movement difficulties.

OPT can be very helpful for individuals who cannot produce or imitate speech sounds using traditional auditory or visual input. This method focuses on expanding speech sound production from phonemes (individual speech sounds) and other similar oral movements the individual can already produce. Once the individual can produce a targeted speech sound using traditional auditory or visual input, speech therapy can continue in a more typical manner.

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This therapy can potentially be used to treat the following:

Apraxia

CAS is a motor speech disorder, probably of genetic origin, affecting the individual’s ability to voluntarily make the right movements during speech.

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Articulation Difficulties

Speech sound delay, also referred to as an articulation delay, is when a child is behind in the development of his or her speech sounds.

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Phonology

As children are learning to talk, they may apply different patterns to simplify speech.

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Speech Clarity

Speech clarity (intelligibility) significantly impacts the ability of an individual to get their message across.

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