What is PROMPT?
PROMPT stands for Prompts for Restructuring Oral Musculature Phonetic Targets. PROMPT is a tactile kinesthetic based treatment method that employs components of both articulatory/kinematic and rhythmic rate control strategies in treatment of apraxia of speech.
While using this method the clinician touches the person’s face and head to help them learn motor movements for speech production. PROMPT helps the child develop the proper place, manner, and voicing for the movement patterns of speech. Prior to touching a patient’s face, rapport and a positive relationship must be built. So, it may take a few sessions before a PROMPT trained therapist uses PROMPT on their patient and provides those tactile cues.
PROMPT can be used as a tactile cue and help children learn the proper movement patterns for producing a word. PROMPT can also be used in DTTC, Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing, and can be incorporated as the tactile cueing portion.
PROMPT has shown to be very successful to use with children with apraxia of speech as well as articulation and phonological disorders.
Research supports that PROMPT, as well as other methods for treating childhood apraxia of speech or other significant motor speech disorders, should incorporate Principles of Motor Learning. PROMPT, is effective in treating many children with motor speech disorders, including childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) and dysarthria. This method has also been used with acquired brain injuries and autism.
As a method, PROMPT helps the client gain voluntary control of the motor speech system and links the necessary motor movements that help create holistic motor-phoneme maps to linguistic equivalents for use in communication (Hayden, 1999.) PROMPT helps children learn the motor patterns to produce certain words, and in turn, can help children learn to produce speech accurately.
At Crossroads, we use PROMPT with our clients who may benefit from it, and we have over 8 clinicians certified in this method and more part time speech therapists certified in it too.
