Review: VAST iPhone / iPad Therapy Apps by Speak in Motion

Speak in Motion provided me with complementary copies of the VAST Songs 1 - Intro app and the VAST Autism 1 - Core app for review.

The VAST Song 1 - Intro app and the VAST Autism 1 - Core app are very different from the typical speech therapy apps. They do not focus on specific sounds. Their target audience is functioning at a nonverbal or minimally verbal level. These are the apps you're going to want to reach for when you have a student who is not responding to traditional speech therapy methods. Specific populations that come to mind are children with Autism, children with severe Childhood Apraxia of Speech, and children with TBI affecting speech.

VAST Autism 1 - Core iPhone / iPad App

The VAST Autism app is focused on practicing functional spoken scripts at syllable, simple word, multi-syllable word, phrase, and sentence levels. Once you choose the level appropriate for the child you are working with, you choose the specific script you want the child to learn. Then the child begins by simply watching and listening to a close-up video of an adult speaking that script slowly and clearly (yet with fairly natural intonation).

The videos stimulate both auditory and visual pathways in the brain. They also allow for simultaneous production which is known to stimulate speech production. The slightly slower production paired with relatively natural intonation also helps facilitate success. The app includes good choices of stimuli. For example, the syllable level includes: mama, papa, moo moo, boo boo, baa baa, beep beep, peep peep, da da, pop pop, la la, Weeee, and Ooooo. These are nice, simple reduplicated syllables using simple consonants and vowels. The levels progess logically from simple reduplicated syllables, to one-syllable words, multi-syllable words, phrases, and then sentences. As the productions get more complex, the stimuli choices focus on functional scripts. For example, some of the sentence level stimuli are: " I need to use the bathroom.", "I am thirsty.", "I am hungry.", and "I need a break.".

Bottom Line

This is an app that consists entirely of carefully chosen stimulus videos. It is accessibly priced at $4.99. If you work with students who are minimally verbal and are not yet responding to therapy targeting specific phonemes this app might be very useful for you. If you do not have any non-verbal or minimally verbal children on your caseload you would probably find little use for this app.

VAST Songs 1 - Intro iPhone / iPad App

The VAST Songs app is a set of videos that show a close-up of either a male of female singer singing one of 10 songs. These videos are useful during therapy because they provide both auditory and visual stimuli and they also stimulate the pathways in the brain involved in music. Research has shown that the rhythm and melody involved in music can often help stimulate speech production. Alternately, they could be used during carryover practice in more traditional articulation therapy (Yankee Doodle for /k/, for example.)

Bottom Line

This is an app that consists entirely of carefully chosen stimulus videos. It is accessibly priced at $4.99. If you work with students who are minimally verbal and are not yet responding to therapy targeting specific phonemes this app might be very useful for you. It might also provide a creative way of working on specific phoneme carryover with other young clients. If you are not working with severely speech delayed children, you might be better off finding a different app for your needs.

Mini Review: Reading Raven

Reading Raven: A Mini-Review

I purchased Reading Raven for my children and we all love it. It is reasonably priced at $3.99.

This app does a great job at teaching early reading and writing from a phonics perspective. The game is divided into five lessons each with its own theme. The games within each lesson are similar, but changing the theme freshens them up considerably as the child levels up. The mini-games within each lesson teach letter-sound correspondences, sight words, sounding out words, spelling, and even writing. Sections of the game allow children to record their own voice reading and then compare the word they read to the one the narrator reads to see if they get it right. Other sections help them trace individual letters in a word and then the program shows them the completed word in their own handwriting. Every few mini-games they earn a sticker that they use to decorate Reading Raven's treehouse and my son enjoys that as well.

I feel it was a $3.99 very well spent.

Review: Speech Therapy for Apraxia by NACD - iPad App

Speech Therapy for Apraxia iPad App by NACD and Blue Whale App Development: A Review

I purchased this app in order to evaluate it. It is very reasonably priced in the app store for only $4.99.

Detailed Description

Blue Whale is offering their Speech Therapy for Apraxia iPad app for $4.99 at the app store. I find the app to be rather soothing and visually appealing as did my children. The pictures are sweet and the interface is simple. Let's look at what the app does in more detail.

This app allows you to work with one group of phonemes at a time. /b/, /p/, and /m/ are grouped together. /d/, /n/, and /t/ are grouped together. /g/, /k/, and /h/ are grouped together. /w/ is on its own. /f/ and /v/ are grouped. /s/ and /z/ are grouped. /sh/, /ch/, and /J/ are grouped. Finally,, /l/ and /r/ are grouped. They are grouped roughly by developmental sequence and place of articulation. I particularly like the simple, just thorough enough, and easily understandable explanations on the options screens.

Once you've chosen your phoneme set, you are taken to a screen that lets you choose a difficulty level. There are eight difficulty levels that progress in a very logical manner from level one (still CV syllables, but presented in groups of five with a variety of vowels and pulling from two sets of consonants rather than one).

That's it. Once you've made those two choices (consonant group and initial difficulty level) the practice session begins. The stimuli appear on the page. They are a mix of nonsense syllables and real words.

Very young children will have trouble learning the nonsense CV combinations even though the developers make each two letter combination a unique font/color which is a nice touch. However, if the child cannot say the syllable spontaneously, all they have to do is tap on it to hear a model. The child repeats all the syllables and then swipes their finger to move to a new page of randomly chosen (within the structure of the difficulty level) stimuli. When they reach the end of the stimuli the final page allows the therapist to choose to repeat the same difficulty level or to move on to the next.

The program does not track data at all. There is no mechanism for data tracking and therefore keeping track of separate students is unnecessary. It is purely a simple, elegant method of practicing at the syllable level with severely apraxic children.

My 3 1/2 year old daughter was easily able to "play" this speech game independently. I see it as having a place in a therapy room. It would allow you to have one child happily drilling productions while you work with another child individually before switching. At $4.99 it is a very reasonable program to recommend to parents as well

Pros, Cons, and Bottom Line

If you have any children at all on your caseload who need drill at the CV level, this app is a great deal. It is perfect for introducing a new phoneme to apraxic children. It would be great practice for a phonological process or artic child who is struggling to learn a new consonant in initial position.

This app is extremely comprehensive in what it does: CV syllables in an increasing hierarchy of difficulty. They've included pictures of real words where possible and made the visual cues unique when a real picture did not apply.

Here's my bottom line. If you ever need to drill at the syllable level and you like incorporating iPad work into your speech room grab this app. At the price, it will be worth every penny. If you rarely work at the CV level and prefer to skip straight to simple CV, VC, and CVC real words than you won't find anything useful in this app.

Review: Articulation Scenes by Smarty Ears - iPad App

Articulation Scenes iPad App by Smarty Ears: A Review

An evaluation copy of this app was provided to me for free. I was not otherwise compensated for this review.

Detailed Description

Smarty Ears is offering their Articulation Scenes app for $34.99 at the app store. This app allows you to create profiles for multiple children. When you hit "Play" you choose the name of the student you are working with and then the phoneme (p, m, h, w, n, b, d, y, t, k, g, ng, f, ch, j, l, r, v, s, z, sh, and th). Once you identify the phoneme you wish to target you can choose a scene to work with. The scene is a picture filled with items that feature that phoneme. M, N, B, D, T, K, G, F, CH, V, Z, SH, and TH(voiced and voiceless combined) all have Initial, Medial, and Final scenes available. P has I, M, and two F scenes. H and Y have only an initial scene. NG has M and two F scenes. L has I, M, F, and an L-Blends scene. S has I, M, F, SK, SP, and ST. R has M, F, Pre-Vocalic R, and separate scenes for 6 of the vocalic R sounds.

Once you've chosen a scene, you can choose one of four activities to do with that scene: Find the Hidden Items, Tap and Say It, The Movie Theater, and The Production Room. If your iPad is connected to a wireless printer, there is also a simple homework document associated with each scene that features the target word pictures from that scene.

The Find the Hidden Items game simply lists the target words across the bottom of the page. The child can tap on the word to have it read to them. Then they search for that item on the page and tap on it. Once they find it, that target word disappears from the bottom of the screen and is replaced by another until all the words are found. This activity has no data tracking mechanism. You'll have to track accuracy on your own on a separate piece of paper.

In the Tap and Say It activity tapping on one of the target items brings up a popup that shows a picture of the target word and produces a model. After the child says the word (or you can choose to record it with your iPad) you can choose missed it, almost, or got it for data tracking purposes. Then when you back out, you can go to that child's progress report and see a record of the activity and the percentages of correct/almost/incorrect for that activity. You might find it more useful to think of the "Missed It" category as omission, the "Almost" category as substitution/distortion (whichever applies to that particular student/phoneme, and "Correct" as correct. That data scheme would be more useful.

The Movie Theater activity shows the scene while reading a story that incorporates all the target words. As far as I can tell, this is simply a passive listening activity.

The final activity is The Production Room. In this activity, the child is prompted to make up their own story about the scene and record it, or to read a script of the pre-prepared story about that scene. Then they can listen to the recording of themselves telling a story about the scene. There is no data collection mechanism for this activity.

Pros, Cons, and Bottom Line

This app includes a lot of target phonemes with the pictures incorporated into scenes that provide context and facilitate sentence level productions and generalization and carryover. The scenes are attractive and children will particularly enjoy finding the hidden pictures. If a set of 72 scenes with over 1500 target picture words is worth $34.99 to you, then you've already made a decision.

Many of the target words are fairly complex in syllable structure, so this app might not be best suited for working with children with more severe delays. For example, the stimuli for initial /p/ are: pig, pie, plate, pear, parcel, pot, pen, pin, pearl, pencil, paper, purse, pizza, peace, paint, pole, purple, pink, paint, pants, and pliers. Only 7/21 are simple CV or CVC words. All the others contain vocalic-r, consonant blends, or are two-syllable. Also, within app data tracking is minimal so be prepared to track performance separately. In my opinion, these are the major disadvantages of this program.

Here's my bottom line. If you are working with straightforward artic students who do not need a lot of single-syllable, simple syllable shape stimuli and don't mind keeping your data separately, this app might be worth the price. The scenes are great for keeping interest and for facilitation of carryover and generalization. If you are working with children who need simpler stimuli, you are likely to be frustrated with the composition of the targets included in the scenes and you would probably be better off looking elsewhere for stimuli for therapy.

Review and Giveaway: Learning Fundamentals Phonology Apps

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to review two great articulation apps by Learning Fundamentals and host a giveaway of one of their apps. This week I am going to review two of their Phonology apps and Learning Fundamentals has generously offered to sponsor another giveaway of one of their speech and language apps (up to a $59.99 value) to one of my readers. More on how to enter the giveaway at the end of this review.

Phonology: An iPhone/iPad app from Learning Fundamentals

Phonology: App Tour

The Phonology app is a simple to use, yet full-featured app that puts a large set of words with word, phrase, and sentence level audio prompts at your fingertips. Let's take a look at what the screen looks like when you're actually doing therapy.



Each target word is presented as a simple color picture. You may choose to have the word displayed in text below the picture or you may turn that off. Below the picture are several types of prompts. From left to right: "W" plays a high quality audio prompt of the word, "P" plays a short phrase, "S" plays a simple sentence prompt, "Lp" plays the word with a long pause between the target phoneme and the rest of the word, "Sp" plays the word with a short pause between the target phoneme and the rest of the word, and "Ex" plays the word with the target phoneme exaggerated. These six audio prompts are available for every word included in the program.

Above the picture you see a microphone symbol and a speaker symbol. Click on the microphone and wait a moment for it to turn red. Then have the child say the word (or phrase or sentence). Click on the microphone again to turn off the recording. The speaker icon will turn green and you can play back their production for them. You can redo the recording as many times as you like. This feature is simple, useful, and very motivating for the children.

Once the child has made the production you click on the icons at the very bottom to tally scoring data. You can do this multiple times so if you're having a child do sets of three, for example, you can tally their accuracy all three times before moving on to the next word.

In the options you can choose from two different data collection schemes. The first is spontaneous correct/incorrect and imitated correct/incorrect. The second is correct/distortion/incorrect. You simply touch the symbol to record the type of response the student produced.

The settings menu is simple. There is a great set of instructions. The phonological process tab allows you to go in and choose the specific processes you want to work on in the session. You can even choose specific phonemes. If you're working on initial consonant deletion, yet your child cannot make an initial /k/, you can choose to include all initial phonemes except initial /k/. That is a level of customization most apps do not allow and yet is extremely useful.

You can view the target word lists. The options screen allows you to enter the child's name so that a name will be attached to your results data. You can also choose whether to have the word appear in text below the picture. The options screen allows you to reset the scoring data so that you can switch to another student or to a new set of phonemes. This is also where you choose which scoring scheme you want to use.

The results page is pretty simple. It is a simple record of the number of response types you tallied and the phonemes/phonological processes you were working on. It does not calculate percentages for you. If you were working on multiple phonemes or processes, it does not separate out the data for your different targets. I would love to see a more full featured results screen in a future update. (I believe that Learning Fundamentals is working on adding this functionality to their apps and will be adding this feature to future updates quite soon.)

Phonology: Phonological Processes and Phonemes Included

The app addresses four of the most common phonological processes:

• initial consonant deletion (/k, l, r/)
• final consonant deletion (/p, t, k, ps, ts, ks, m, n, er/)
• cluster reduction (/s, l, and r/ clusters)
• syllable reduction (2-syllable words, 3-syllable words)

The app does a wonderful job of addressing final consonant deletion and cluster reduction. The word lists for those processes are deep and the level of customization is impressive. Initial consonant deletion is only addressed through three initial phonemes and those phonemes (k, l, and r) are ones that would be difficult for children exhibiting initial consonant deletion as a phonological process. It would be challenging to address initial consonant deletion with those three specific phonemes as the only initial phoneme categories included in the set. The word sets for the two and three syllable words are relatively short (7 words each), so syllable reduction is addressed in this app with a relatively limited set of targets. By going into the options and choosing initial /l/ and initial /r/ you could work on gliding too although that is not explicitly listed as one of the phonological processes addressed in the app.

Phonology: General Impressions

I liked this app a lot. I like the simplicity of design. I think their pictures are well chosen and their audio prompts are extremely well done. I love the ability to make an audio recording of the child's production and play it back for them. Keeping scoring data is simple and I like being able to make multiple tallies per word before moving to the next word. I particularly like being able to customize the specific phonemes used to work on the phonological processes so that I am not forced to include phonemes that are too difficult for a particular student.

If the phonological processes you're looking to work on are final consonant deletion, cluster reduction, or gliding (all extremely common) this is an great app for you. If you want to work on initial consonant deletion using /k, r, and l/ or syllable reduction using a small set of words those phonological processes are included in a more limited fashion. If you need any of the other phonological processes they aren't going to be found in this particular app.

Most of the words included in this app are one-syllable words which is great. Many are simple CVC words which means that this app can be very useful for people working with children with more severe speech delays.

One drawback, is that the app is not set up to handle groups. You will pretty much need to work with a student individually or taking turns. Whenever you switch students you'll need to save and then reset your scoring data before starting with then next student. Perhaps in a future update, they'll figure out a way for you to enter multiple students and have the app take turns keeping separate scoring data sets.

One final area that I think could use improvement is their results and scoring. I would like to see the results screen calculate percentages. I would also love to have it sort out the scores for the different phonemes/phonological processes. I also do not find "incorrect" to be a useful scoring category. I'd rather have correct, distortion, substitution, and omission as scoring options. The results screen would give me a percentage correct/incorrect with incorrect being the distortion, substitution, and omission categories all combined. Then, I'd like the percent breakdown of the types of errors within the incorrect category. Perhaps that could also be an improvement in a future update. (I believe Learning Fundamentals is working on pushing out this improvement to at least some of their apps very soon.)

Phonology: Bottom Line

This is a great app for final consonant deletion, cluster reduction, and gliding (in initial position) if you don't need it to be a great tool in groups. It can also be of some use for practicing syllable reduction with a limited number of targets (14 total) and initial consonant deletion (only with initial /l, r, and k/). I continue to feel that the Learning Fundamentals speech apps are some of the best I've seen in terms of their ease of use, breadth of targets, and quality of pictures and audio prompts. The portability of the iPhone/iPad format is an added bonus.

Minimal Pairs: An iPhone/iPad app from Learning Fundamentals

Minimal Pairs: App Tour

The Minimal Pairs app presents two minimal pair pictures at a time and asks the child to touch one of the two pictures. You could use this app as receptive auditory discrimination practice, or ask the children to produce one of the two words and work on production. Minimal pair categories addressed include initial consonant deletion (/k, l, r/), final consonant deletion (/k, n, p, t/) and /s/-cluster reduction (/sk, sl, sm, sn, sp, st, sw/).



The app presents two pictures at a time (ex: bow, bone). When the pictures appear, an audio prompt will instruct, "Show me ______." The child can tap on the picture and hear the word associated with that picture. The therapist can score responses by tapping on icons at the bottom of the screen. You will need to decide ahead of time if you are scoring correct/incorrect auditory discrimination vs. correct/distorted/incorrect productions. You can choose to have small boxes appear below the pictures. If you tap on those boxes, you can get visual feedback about performance on the auditory discrimination task separately from the scoring at the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, the app does not keep track of those checkboxes for reporting purposes, so it is not useful for data collection. In the future, I would love to see this app incorporate a correct/substitution/distortion/omission format for data collection on productions at the bottom of the screen and also track the correct/incorrect checkboxes and report that data in the reporting form for tracking auditory discrimination accuracy.

My children really enjoyed playing with this app. They enjoyed the interactive elements. They liked swiping to see the next set of pictures. They liked tapping on the picture to choose the presented word. They liked recording themselves saying a word and listening to their own productions. The app is simple, yet intrinsically rewarding for a child to play with in the context of speech practice.

Minimal Pairs: Bottom Line

If you like working with minimal pairs and want to use minimal pairs to address initial consonant deletion, final consonant deletion, or /s/ cluster reduction, this is a useful, reasonably priced app that children should enjoy using. Just remember that it currently has very basic scoring and reporting options, no way to track auditory discrimination data separately from production data, and the limitation of working with one student at a time.

Learning Fundamentals app Giveaway!!!

One week from today I will use a random number generator to choose a valid entry from the comments on this post. Learning Fundamentals will provide me with a promo code to redeem the app of that reader's choice at the Apple store. To enter, check out the apps available at the Learning Fundamentals website and choose your favorite. Come back to this post and leave the name of the Learning Fundamentals app you'd like to have and what you like most about that particular app in a comment on this post. That's it. I extend my thanks to Learning Fundamentals for sponsoring this giveaway here at Testy Yet Trying. I'll accept entries through midnight on Sunday, July 1, 2012 and announce the winner on Monday, July 2nd.

Review and Giveaway: Learning Fundamentals Articulation Apps

Learning Fundamentals LocuTour has been making speech and language software since 1994. They recently began to convert some of their software into iPhone / iPad apps and provided me with copies of some of their new apps to evaluate. They generously offered to sponsor a giveaway of one of their apps (up to a $59.99 value) to a reader. More on how to enter the giveaway at the end of this review.

(Yes, this is a really long review, but if you're actually interested in the app I hope you'll find the comprehensiveness of the review useful and besides, there's a giveaway at the end to reward you for your persistence.)

Artic Practice: An iPhone/iPad app from Learning Fundamentals

Artic Practice: App Tour

The Artic Practice app is a simple to use, yet full-featured app that puts a large set of words with word, phrase, and sentence level audio prompts at your fingertips. Let's take a look at what the screen looks like when you're actually doing therapy.



Each target word is presented as part of a scene. You can choose to have the word displayed in text below the picture or you may turn that off. Below the picture are several types of prompts. From left to right, you can click on "W" to hear a high quality audio sample prompt of the word. Click on "Snd" to hear the word broken into its individual phonemes. Click on "P" to hear the word in a phrase. Click on "S" to hear the word in a sentence. Click on "SQ" to hear the word in a question. Click on "SA" to hear the word in an answer to the question. These six audio prompts are available for every word included in the program.

Above the picture you see a microphone symbol and a speaker symbol. Click on the microphone and wait a moment for it to turn red. Then have the child say the word (or phrase, sentence, or question). Click on the microphone again to turn off the recording. The speaker icon will turn green and you can play back their production for them. You can redo the recording as many times as you like. This feature is simple, useful, and very motivating for the children.

Once the child has made the production you click on the icons at the very bottom to tally scoring data. You can do this multiple times so if you're having a child do sets of three, for example, you can tally their accuracy all three times before moving on to the next word.

In the options you can choose from two different data collection schemes. The first is spontaneous correct/incorrect and imitated correct/incorrect. The second is correct/distortion/incorrect. You simply touch the symbol to record the type of response the student produced.



The settings menu is simple. There is a great set of instructions. The phoneme tab allows you to go in and choose the specific phonemes you want to work on in the session. You can view the word lists. The options screen allows you to enter the child's name so that a name will be attaches to your results data. You can also choose whether to have the word appear in text below the picture. The options screens allows you to reset the scoring data so that you can switch to another student or to a new set of phonemes. This is also where you choose which scoring scheme you want to use.

The results page is pretty simple. It is a simple record of the number of response types you tallied and the phonemes you were working on. It does not calculate percentages for you. If you were working on multiple phonemes, it does not separate out the data for your different targets. I would love to see a more full featured results screen in a future update.

Artic Practice: Phonemes Included

The app includes the following target sounds in initial, medial, and final position unless otherwise indicated: /p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, th-, th+ (I,M), s, z, sh, zh(M), ch, J, l, r, m, n, ng(M, F), hw (I, M), H (I), y (I, M), l clusters, r clusters, z clusters, s clusters, and vocalic r/. You can choose to target any of the phonemes individually or in combination. This is an extremely comprehensive set of phonemes and a huge word list. Each word in each category is provided with audio samples for word level, phoneme level, phrase level, two sentences, and a question.

Artic Practice: General Impressions

I liked this app a lot. The pictures are well done and I like the fact that the picture is presented in a scene. It allows flexibility to use the word in a phrase or sentence. It also allows you to use this app creatively for language practice as well. I love the functionality of being able to make a recording of the child's production for playback and how quickly and seamlessly that works. Ava and Michael also enjoyed working with the app. As I first opened it and began exploring it, Ava wandered over and crawled into my lap to "play". She was more than happy to do the speech practice as long as she got to make a recording each time and listen to herself and I let her be the one to swipe her finger across the screen to move to the next picture.

I do have the same concerns about this set of stimuli that I do with other card sets and artic apps though. If you have a severely delayed child, this app will not work for you. Although it does target initial /p/, for example, the target words are often multisyllabic or include blends. If you work with children who need practice at the CV, VC, CVC level, this will not be the app for you. If you are working with more typical articulation clients though, this app is a wonderful resource. Perhaps in a future update they will allow you to filter by syllable length and filter out consonant blends and clusters. That would open this app up a lot for use with more severe speech delays.

Another drawback, is that the app is not set up to handle groups. You will pretty much need to work with a student individually or taking turns. Whenever you switch students you'll need to save and then reset your scoring data before starting with then next student. Perhaps in a future update, they'll figure out a way for you to enter multiple students and have the app take turns keeping separate scoring data sets.

One final area that I think could use improvement is their results and scoring. I would like to see the results screen calculate percentages. I would also love to have it sort out the scores for the different phonemes. For example, I might mix initial /p/ words(easy) with initial /s/ words(hard), and initial /f/ words(also hard) for Ava in order to improve generalization. I would be expecting her to get 100% of the initial /p/ words, and would really only be interested in the percentages for the other two phonemes - separately. This app only gives the tallies for all three phonemes grouped together which is not actually a useful number for me at all. I'd need to keep data using pen and paper. I also do not find "incorrect" to be a useful scoring category. I'd rather have correct, distortion, substitution, and omission as scoring options. The results screen would give me a percentage correct/incorrect with incorrect being the distortion, substitution, and omission categories all combined. Then, I'd like the percent breakdown of the types of errors within the incorrect category. Perhaps that could also be an improvement in a future update.

Artic Practice: Bottom Line

I think this app would be an amazing value if you are not working with severely speech delayed students, you're not too picky about scoring, and you don't need it to be a great tool in groups. The breadth of the target phonemes included, the audio prompts, the beautiful pictures, and the recording and playback make this a great value for anyone doing a lot articulation therapy with students with mild-moderate articulation errors. The portability of the iPhone/iPad format is an added bonus.

Articulation IV: An iPhone/iPad app from Learning Fundamentals

Articulation IV: Abbreviated App Tour

The Articulation IV app is very similar in format to the Artic Practice app so I'll just focus on the differences. Let's take a look at what the screen looks like when you're actually doing therapy.



The Articulation IV app is more advanced than the Artic Practice app and consequently has slightly different prompting levels. It has the word in isolation, broken into individual phonemes and in a phrase. It also has the word in a simple sentence, longer sentence, and complex sentence. See the above set of screenshots for one example.

Articulation IV: Phonemes Included

The app includes the following target sounds in initial, medial, and final position unless otherwise indicated: /l, l-clusters, pre-vocalic l, post-vocalic l, r (I, M), r-clusters (I, M), s, s-clusters, vocalic r (sorted by vowel), th+ (I, M), th-, th- clusters (I, F), z, and z-clusters (F)/. You can choose to target any of the phonemes individually or in combination. This is an extremely comprehensive set of more advanced phonemes and a huge word list. Each word in each category is provided with audio samples for word level, phoneme level, phrase level, and multiple sentences.

Articulation IV: Bottom Line

If you work with students who make errors with the phonemes targeted in this app, this is a great resource and perfectly set up to work very well on carryover and generalization skills. Just remember that it has the same basic scoring and results features as the Artic Practice app and the limitation of working with one student at a time.

Learning Fundamentals app Giveaway!!!

One week from today I will use a random number generator to choose a valid entry from the comments on this post. Learning Fundamentals will provide me with a promo code to redeem the app of that reader's choice at the Apple store. To enter, check out the apps available at the Learning Fundamentals website and choose your favorite. Come back to this post and leave the name of the Learning Fundamentals app you'd like to have and the setting in which you will be using it (at home with your own child, in private practice, in the schools, etc.) in a comment. That's it. I extend my thanks to Learning Fundamentals for sponsoring my very first giveaway here at Testy Yet Trying. I'll accept entries through midnight on Tuesday, June 19, 2012 and announce the winner on Thursday, June 21st.

Next week I'll be reviewing two of Learning Fundamentals Phonology apps and hosting a second giveaway.