Hey, there! My name is Sara, and I am a PROMPT trained Speech Pathologist. I currently work in both our Spartanburg and Greenville Clinics here at MTSKids, and I frequently get questions from my patients’ parents like these:

“My child has Autism. How does that impact his/her therapy treatment?”

“My child had a rough day at school today. How will that affect his/her therapy session?”

“My child is doing great making progress in therapy, but the vocabulary he/she is learning is difficult for us to use in every-day-life. What more can we do to help his therapy translate better at home?”

PROMPT, or “Prompts for Restructuring Oral Muscular Phonetic Targets,”  is a tested treatment technique that provides a wholistic approach to Speech Therapy and can help address some of these questions.

Here are 5 reasons why PROMPT therapy could be beneficial to your child:

  1. Treats the child as a whole, considering all domains of development by taking into account various aspects that could be impacting the child that day (i.e., cognitive/linguistic, physical/sensory, and social/emotional factors).

  2. Takes a motor perspective on the child’s speech development from the first evaluation all throughout treatment.

    • PROMPT approaches therapy from the beginning of speech development through a hierarchy as the child’s motor speech system continues to grow. For example, a PROMPT trained therapist would work with the child on specific jaw movements to help open and close the mouth, and/or to make simple babbling sounds, before working on more advanced sounds that involve using the tongue such as /n, t, d/.

  3. Appropriately treats for a variety of diagnoses including, but not limited to:  Autism, Down Syndrome, Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Hypotonia, an articulation and/or phonological disorder, etc.

  4. Therapist uses touch cues on the patient to help develop oral muscular movements using the jaw, lips, teeth, and tongue for speech production.

  5. Vocabulary used in therapy is built to target functional language that the child and parent can both use at home and in the community outside of the clinic, making it more practical for day-to-day life.

Be sure to check out www.promtinstitute.com for more details on PROMPT therapy, and click on our Contact Us-Patients tab to ask a question or schedule an appointment today!

Sarah Emory