The Core Vocabulary approach

The Core Vocabulary Intervention is a treatment strategy that was created for children who have inconsistent phonological disorder (IPD) but who do not have childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). This approach is for kids who are highly unintelligible and whose family/caregivers struggle to understand the child. Because these children have many errors, the focus of treatment is to produce the most consistent productions of a word that a child can make. This approach differs from other phonological approaches because the focus is on consistent productions instead of accurate productions. Precise phoneme accuracy is less important than consistent whole word productions (Dodd & Iacono, 1989). The goal is to help the child be able to more effectively communicate wants and needs to family and caregivers, so words that are have a high frequency and are functional and meaningful to the child are chosen as targets.

This approach is most suitable for children aged 2 and above. This includes bilingual children and children with cognitive disabilities. This is a highly personalized approach that requires consistent involvement from the child's caregivers. The recommended service delivery model entails 2 weekly sessions lasting 30 minutes each, typically spanning 8 weeks. The speech-language pathologist collaborates with the child, caregivers, family, and educators to compile a list of 70 target words that hold functional and meaningful relevance for the child. Each week, the SLP endeavors to establish the child's most accurate and consistent pronunciation of up to 10 target words, which are subsequently practiced at home daily. The SLP drills and monitors the consistent pronunciation of these target words while gathering feedback from caregivers regarding their consistency in the child's home productions. At the onset of each week's initial session, the child is asked to produce the previous week's target words three times. Words that are pronounced consistently no longer need to be drilled and are removed from the target list, while the ones that are pronounced inconsistently remain on the list for future practice. Every 14 days, a set of 10 untreated words should be elicited three times to check for systemic changes and generalization. Once 50 of the child's core vocabulary words exhibit consistency, the SLP conducts a reassessment to evaluate generalization.

This approach is an effective and quick way to increase a child’s communication and reduce potential frustration without having to slowly target specific sounds individually.

Source:

Interventions for Speech Sound Disorders by A. L. Williams, S. McLeod, R. J. McCauley. 2021, Paul H. Booked Publishing Co.