Week 2 Update (Part I)

I'm going to see if I can get a video of someone doing some sort of speech exercise with Quince for you guys, since it's pretty hard to understand what his speech is like unless you can hear it. In the meantime, here is the first part of my weekly update.

On Tuesday, I went with my dad to ASU to meet Dr. Ingram for my first lab day of actually doing things other than introductions. I sorted through and organized a bunch of files that were part of a study on the language development of children with cleft palates. At first, I didn't really understand what this had to do with my project, but I soon realized that even though the language delays were different, the tools used to track the children's progress was the same. Specifically, each child was tested using a Profile of Early Expressive Phonological Skills (PEEPS) twice, once around the age of two and once six to ten months later. On these tests, the administrators had recorded the child's phonetic pronunciations of each word, which was interesting for me to see as I have been trying to learn a bit of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) so that I can record my brother's speech. The IPA looks something like this: 

http://ipa-paradise.weebly.com/ipa.html

We also tried to work out a way for me to do the CITI HIPAA training, but we couldn't get around the request for an ASU email address, which I do not have. I think they're going to look into seeing if their department can get me a temporary one or something.

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Five hours of work in a small office would be hard on anyone, but for a hyperactive five year old, it's especially tough. On Wednesday, my mom and I decided to let Quince have a break for the last hour of his ABA, so I took him swimming, dragging his therapist along too. Quince is very stimulated by water and loves anything to do with it: surfing, swimming, even bath time.

Quince and someone (probably me, but possibly one of my other sisters) surfing.

We actually managed to fit in some speech work during this time. Here are some examples of how we can get him to practice talking at the pool:

Prompt: "Quince, where are we going?" 

Expected response: "Pool" (puh) or "Swimming" (fuh-fuh)

Prompt: Standing on the edge of the pool, about to jump it. "Ready, set, ..."

Expected response: "Go" (go or guh, it varies)

Prompt: "Are you all done swimming or do you want more?"

Expected response: "All done" (ah dun) or "More" (muh or muh-muh, this also varies). Whatever he says here, we always follow through, unless he seems to want the opposite, in which case we usually ask him again.

After swimming, we headed straight to speech. My mom and I were hoping Quince would be more focused and less hyper after using up all his energy in the pool, but this did not seem to be the case. In speech, one of the main things they have been working on is showing Quince a set of pictures and getting him to say the sounds the objects pictured make. This picture set is very focused on specific sounds that we want Quince to say, such as the long o sound. 

The aforementioned picture set

This time, when the therapist got out the picture set, she pointed to the cow and asked him what it said. Instead, he pointed to the horse and said "neigh neigh" very clearly, which was definitely good because it was spontaneous and well-pronounced. However, it was pretty clear that he was avoiding the long o sound of "moo moo" that we are trying to help him develop.

One thing I'm learning from the speech therapists is to adapt my programs to Quince's attention span, not my own. At speech, they move between exercises and breaks quickly, nearly too fast for me to follow, but it helps to prevent Quince from getting bored or frustrated.

In the next post, I will explain what I did the rest of the week, and hopefully I will be able to show you a sample of Quince's speech as well.