The effects of minimal pairs treatment on the speech-sound production of two children with phonologic disorders.

Two children whose speech-sound production could be described by phonologic processes were administered a linguistically based treatment program that utilized minimal pair words. A subset of phonemes affected by a target phonologic process was taught consecutively. Spontaneous picture-naming probes were administered periodically to measure speech-sound production for all phonemes affected by the targeted phonologic process and several control phonologic processes. For both subjects, motoric components (i.e., models and phonetic placement cues) had to be added to the minimal pairs treatment. With the added motoric components, both subjects successfully passed through all treatment steps. However, neither subject generalized modified speech-sound production to treated phonemes in untreated words or to untreated phonemes affected by the target phonologic process.