Melodic Intonation Therapy

from 100 times per hour to zero per hour. According to Goldfarb (2006), overcorrection needs to be done right after the undesired behaviour is performed because the children might think the overcorrection is arbitrary and not directly towards that unpleasant behaviour. Next, Goldfarb also acknowledged that overcorrection need to be done repeatedly and the duration also needs to be lengthy to prevent the children from lost focus and directed to other reinforcing activities. For the person that suffered from aphasia, there is plenty of treatment which is useful for them. Aphasia is a condition where the person have trouble in either comprehension or fluency in language due to impairment in a certain part of the brain (Damasto A.R.,

Melodic Intonation Therapy is conducted by embedding melody pattern in phrases or sentences. When the patient shows some improvement with the prosody, the melody aspect is slowly removed (Goldfarb R., 2006). For an example, firstly, the patient is given a certain phrase and the part that need to be stressed need to sing in high notes. After this step is trained repeatedly, the stressed part will have longer vowel duration, better amplitude displacement and pitch variation. Lastly, the patient could be able to produce speech with normal prosody, explained Goldfarb R.

(2006) that it becomes vital for SLPs to understand their client and have knowledge of behavioural principles or else it will lead to bad behaviour and attitude. SLPs who neglect the clients’ verbal and non-verbal attempt to gain social attention and only response when the client start to tantrum will create assumption that inappropriate behaviour will lead to reinforcement while good attitude is useless. Hence, the frequency for maladaptive behaviour for sake of communication will keep inclining. If the inappropriate behaviour is blindly followed by some sort of punishment, it is believed that the declining of the improper attitude is only temporary. Besides, the punishment from the SLPs might turn out as reinforcement from the client’s point of view As a conclusion, operant conditioning is a method that can be associated with behaviourism theory. Since behaviour is the thing that can be observed directly, it can be conducted for many ranges of behaviour from normal children to children that have problems with behavioural disorder and hearing impairments. The positive results from the researches show that operant conditioning can be used in the therapy for the children with behavioural