How is Sword different from other therapies for apraxia?
Traditional therapies for apraxia often involve training the production of isolated articulatory gestures (e.g. m), and then combining this movement pattern with vowels to form a range of syllables (e.g. ma, me etc.). Such segmental therapies can be effective in developing a range of articulatory positions, but the evidence for the transfer of this capacity to more spontaneous speech production is more limited. By contrast, Sword is based on contemporary psycholinguistic approaches that suggest that words that are used frequently are stored as whole movement patterns. Saying a word such as ‘coffee’ does not involve combining individual sound segments into a whole word. Sword only works at the whole word level. It does not ask users to think about individual articulatory gestures or where or what their tongue might be doing.
