ABSTRACT
There has been significant progress over the past decade in the range of interventions available for speech sound disorders and also in the quality of evidence supporting their benefits (Bernthal & Bankson, 2004; Ruscello, 2007; Bowen, 2009; Williams, McLeod, & McCauley, 2010). Nevertheless, most approaches focus on identifying and remediating abnormal consonants—rather than vowels—in children’s speech. As a result, speech clinicians still have little evidence on which to base clinical decisions about therapy for children presenting with vowel errors in their speech. Although vowel difficulties are relatively infrequent, they should not be neglected in the hope that they will necessarily “look after themselves” (Gibbon, 2009). Indeed, based on extensive clinical experience, Hall, Jordon, and Robin (1993) were of the view that children rarely self-correct vowel errors. The current chapter focuses on a range of therapy approaches that are of potential value for increasing the accuracy of vowel production in children with speech disorders. Included in this section are approaches that were developed originally to target consonant errors, but which clinicians could adapt to target vowel errors.
