What is the Complexity approach to PHonology Treatment?

The complexity approach to treating speech sound errors is based on decades of research at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, led by Dr. Judith Gierut, and continued today by Dr. Hollie Storkel. This results of this research indicate that teaching the more complex sounds that children typically develop later in their preschool years may actually help the child learn more sounds more quickly, and result in change throughout the child’s speech sound system. 

This research also indicates that teaching sounds is most effective when there is more than one target sound. Two target sounds are selected that are very different from each other in the way they are produced, then taught in contrasting word pairs such as look/shook. These sounds should also be sounds the child does not have in their system, so therapy tasks may seem to be very difficult for the child at the beginning of therapy.

What kind of Progress results from complexity therapy?

Every child is different, but, in my experience, a child who is unintelligible at the beginning of kindergarten becomes highly intelligible by the end of the school year, sometimes with a few remaining minor speech sound errors. Progress is slow in the beginning, but accelerates and improvement generalizes to many untreated sounds.

What ages benefit from using this approach?

Gierut’s research was done primarily with children ages 3-5.