Vertical Goal Attack Phonology

The average school-based speech-language pathologist (SLP) is likely to maintain a caseload that consists of a significant number of children with phonological disorders (Gierut, 2001). According to the American Speech-Language Hearing Association (1999), 10-15% of preschoolers have a speech disorder. Given the lifelong importance of phonologic learning and intelligibility in daily functioning, there is a need to utilize effective intervention strategies for targeting these skills. Goal-attack strategies, as stated by Fey (1986), arrange treatment in a way that works to eliminate a child’s phonological errors and restructure the phonological system. The vertical, horizontal, and cyclical goal-attack strategies have been applied to multiple

This is in contrast with the vertical-goal attack strategy, in that each session focuses on a wide range of sounds in the phonological system (Bernthal et al., 2013). Elbert and Gierut (1986) described the horizontal strategy as one that trains broad, in that it addresses more sounds at once, and therefore, it works to modify the phonological system more efficiently (Bernthal et al., 2013). Furthermore, the client is likely to determine commonalities among speech sounds, thus providing the client with an enhanced overall understanding of the phonological system (Bernthal, et al.,

Historically, most clinicians utilized the vertical goal-attack strategy to address speech sound disorders. Currently, more clinicians employ the horizontal and cyclical goal-attack strategies (Bernthal et al., 2013). The appeal toward the horizontal and cyclical goal-attack strategies is that both incorporate multiple goals at once, and therefore, clinicians hope to encourage a more efficient phonological learning process (Bernthal et al., 2013). However, there is no evidence that one goal-attack strategy is more efficient than the others (Fey, 1992) and all goal-attack strategies have shown to facilitate gains in phonological performance (Tyler et al.,