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Using
SAILS
SAILS, the Speech Assessment and Interactive Learning System, is a computer-based
approach to phonological therapy that focuses on the importance of providing children
with precise auditory input during all phases of the therapy program. It is now
well established that a high proportion of children for whom articulation treatment
is sought have great difficulty distinguishing correct from error tokens of their
problem sounds. SAILS allows you to assess and effectively treat such children.
The SAILS system provides 16 modules that can be used to assess the child's sensitivity
to commonly-misarticulated phonemes.
The SAILS sytem includes MODGEN, so you can apply the SAILS approach with any
additional target sounds that you desire.
Each SAILS module is an interactive computer/video game that presents the child
with carefully selected speech tokens representing correct and incorrect articulations
of the target sound in a single-word context. These tokens were recorded from
children and adults, and include naturally-occurring misarticulations of the target
sounds-- not simulations. For example, a child who misarticulates /k/ would be
asked to listen to digitized recordings of the word"cat". The child's task is
to identify the correctly produced versions of the target sound by pointing to
a picture of a cat when "cat" is heard, and by pointing to an "X" when any mispronunciation
of "cat" is heard. Cartoon images reward the child for correct judgements with
visual feedback.
Other modules involve a variety of different error patterns. For example, one
module targets the "sh" sound, contrasting the word "sheet" with a variety of
misarticulations including "teet", "theet", "seat", "sleet", etc. Multiple sets
of error sounds are provided with sets of error contrasts presented in order from
least to most difficult.
MODGEN™ Creates New Modules
MODGEN allows you to create new training modules for additional contrasts or idiosynchcratic
client dialects. MODGEN can also be used to help the child learn to self-monitor
during the generalization phase of therapy. Correct and incorrect productions
of any target word can be integrated with the visual feedback pictures to create
an individualized self-monitoring game for your client.
Production Training using PROTRAIN™
Sound production training can follow, or be conducted concurrently with the SAILS
portion of your treatment program. You can use any approach to production training
that you choose, based on the child's needs. SAILS has been integrated successfully
into programs based on the minimal pair, Hodson, and traditional approaches to
therapy. Regardless of the chosen method, PROTRAIN is a program produced by Avaaz,
which can be used to provide the child and the clinician with auditory and visual
feedback about the child's production attempts.
Using SAILS for Assessment
In more recent clinical research, SAILS has been found to be an accurate assessment
tool for identifying children who are most likely to benefit from phonology group
therapy programs. Pretreatment perceptual perfomance, as measured by SAILS, is
a particularly good predictor of treatment progress. In fact, neither performance
on a pretreatment production probe nor degree of stimulability for the target
sound predicted the amount of treatment progress. SAILS performance was the only
reliable predictor of treatment progress for these children. As a consequence
of these findings, all children referred to the phonology groups treatment program
now receive 3 weeks of treatment using SAILS before beginning group therapy.
Why Simulation is Insufficient
The auditory stimuli used in SAILS are critical to the success of the approach.
You might think that an experienced Speech-Language Pathologist could speak words
like "cat" and "tat" to clients and not bother with using preselected sounds in
a computer program like SAILS. However, experience shows that this is not the
case. Most of the more than one hundred children involved in the research described
above have had no difficulty with live-voice, adult- produced stimuli. In fact,
adult simulations of phonological errors do not typically reproduce key acoustic
characteristics of children's misarticulations. Spectrographic analysis underscores
this point. For example, for adults, including Phoneticians and Speech-Language
Pathologists, it is virtually impossible to produce the word "shoe" with the ambiguous
acoustic characteristics that are quite common in children's speech. Such errors
reflect children's tendency to focus on formant transition cues rather than on
noise frequency cues to fricative identity.
The inclusion of such naturally-occuring error sounds in the training set helps
children to shift their attentional focus to the more reliable noise frequency
cue. A careful inspection of the acoustic description of the SAILS training stimuli
reveals other misarticulations that suggest how common it is for children to confuse
the relevant acoustic cues to phoneme identity. Because of these considerations,
SAILS offers a unique approach to phonological disorders. Used in conjunction
with MODGEN and PROTRAIN, SAILS provides a comprehensive system for the assessment
and treatment of children with phonological disorders.
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