MINIMAL PAIRS
Children who have a mild to moderate phonological impairment.
WHAT?
A linguistic treatment approach using word pairs that have minimal phonemic contrast. This contrast involves pairing two words that differ by only one phoneme (Gierut, 1992).
WHY?
To eliminate homonymy by inducing a phonemic split.
GOAL?
To instruct the child that it is necessary to use two different sounds to signal a difference in meaning (Gierut, 1998).
HOW?
Analyze client's misarticulations. This can be done by performing a relational analysis to compare the client's production to the adult production.
Develop minimal contrast pairs of target phoneme with an error phoneme (i.e. tea/key, bow/boat).
Begin treatment by modeling both the target and the contrast words; ask the child to imitate both.
Provide extensive trials on imitative production of the target and contrast words.
Ask the client to spontaneously name picture pairs.
Ask client to produce target word as clinician picks correct picture (the client says boat and the clinician picks up the picture of boat; if the client says bow, clinician picks up the picture of bow and then correct the client).
Ask the client to match two pictures by first picking the picture from several displayed and then selecting its minimal pair match (Hegde, 1996).
References:
Gierut, J. A. (1992). The conditions and course of clinically induced phonological change. JSHR, 35, 1049-1063.
Gierut, J. A. (1998). Treatment efficacy: Functional phonological disorders in children. JSHR, 41, S85-S100.
Hegde, M. N. (1996). Pocket guide to treatment in speech-language pathology. San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc.
Minimal Pairs Treatment Paradigm
LINKS
This website provides added information about minimal pairs.
This website provides an online lesson for minimal pairs treatment.
This website provides materials for minimal pairs treatment.
This Web Page was Created By:
Kristi Richardson, B.S. and Marianne Weirich, B.S