Favorable stimulus words for the treatment of phonological disorders involving the production of simple onset sounds

ABSTRACT Purpose: to develop and analyze a list of target words providing a favorable environment for the acquisition of target sounds in simple onset position, using a programming algorithm to assign a favorability score for each of these words. Methods: an algorithm was programmed to calculate a favorability score for target words by adding up the weights assigned to the following variables, with regards to the target sound: position within the word, stress pattern, number of syllables, preceding and following context. The algorithm was programmed using Java. The lists of target words for each target sound contained a total of 748 words. A score was calculated for each item, and used to classify the word as favorable, neutral, or unfavorable. Results: target words with the highest scores on the aforementioned variables were considered favorable, as they provided a facilitating context for the production of the target sound. However, target words did not need to meet all aforementioned linguistic criteria to be considered favorable. Conclusion: the algorithm was efficient in calculating favorability scores for the target words. However, although words classified as favorable, or those with high scores on linguistic measures, should be preferred during the selection of target stimuli, these may not necessarily apply to all types of phonological disorder.