The importance of production frequency in therapy for childhood apraxia of speech.

Purpose: This study explores the importance of production frequency during speech therapy to determine whether more practice of speech targets leads to increased performance within a treatment session, as well as to motor learning, in the form of generalization to untrained words.

Method: Two children with childhood apraxia of speech were treated with an alternating treatment AB design, with production frequency differing in the 2 treatments. The higher production frequency treatment required 100+ productions in 15 min, while the moderate-frequency treatment required 30-40 productions in the same time period.