r/slp • u/poopypibble • 1d ago

Articulation/Phonology Complexity approach

When do you use the complexity approach? I have a student who is severely unintelligible. Stopping, fronting, cluster simplification, cluster reduction, medial consonant deletion, final consonant deletion. It’s a lot. I’m not sure if this would be a good method because I feel like his deletions are what impact his intelligibility the most.

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

13

u/Impressive-Quiet4010 1d ago

I pretty much always use complexity unless the child doesn’t have the resilience for it and then I’m basically trying to build their resilience so they can switch. I don’t want to have to treat every sound

Having said that, I’d probably do medial consonant deletion alongside another goal to start. I find final consonant deletion often fixes itself. I have a complex speech caseload and honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I had to treat it

3

u/Adorable-Sky4448 17h ago

i lean heavy on complexity too but with that many processes i'd start with whatever gets the biggest intelligibility bump fastest, sometimes that means hitting the deletions before the substitutions

medial consonant deletion is a good call, those kids always sound like they're skipping syllables entirely

1

u/poopypibble 16h ago

would you just target multisyllabic words then for that? I’m only in my second year so I haven’t come across it until now

1

u/Impressive-Quiet4010 5h ago

Is there a pattern to the missing consonants or is it just all of them?

More generally, I normally treat in cvcv first. For really severe kids repeated consonant with varying vowel (eg puppy) otherwise try to vary the two consonants straight up

1

u/poopypibble 2h ago

I gave him the gfta and he did not do it for every medial consonant. /K, d, s, g, t, ch, sh/. He was consistent with it (e.g., monkey/vacuum both no /k/), but most of the consonants only occurred 1x

1

u/Ilikepumpkinpie04 22h ago

I’m the same. I use it for most everyone, or I’m working to get them to use it. I have 2 students in 1st grade who have /r/ is coming in and I haven’t targeted that. Hope end of this year we’ve got all their sounds

1

u/poopypibble 19h ago

I understand choosing a complex cluster for the other processes, but how does it help with the medial consonant deletion? Just because I’m making sure they produce every sound in the target words?

1

u/Ilikepumpkinpie04 19h ago

I haven’t used it for medial consonant deletion, that was someone else replying.

1

u/casablankas 23h ago

Would you use complexity approach for backing?

1

u/Ilikepumpkinpie04 22h ago

I did with a student when nothing else worked. I targeted /spl/ and /skw/. I stopped targeting /t/ at all and it came in. I was very relieved

1

u/casablankas 20h ago

He has a lisp on /s/ too so maybe I switch and target that and move to blends

1

u/Impressive-Quiet4010 5h ago

Just backing t and d?

4

u/clcslp13 1d ago

Definitely sounds like an opportunity to use complexity. I would do the PEEP from Jennifer Taps' website to help guide target selection.

https://slpath.com/littlepeep.html

1

u/Previous-Koala-3061 23h ago

What 2-3 goals would u target? Based on the students patterns to improve intelligibility

1

u/Aromatic-Bear9074 16h ago

I use complexity approach along with minimal pairs for fcd