Oral Placement Therapy

Oral Placement Therapy is a speech therapy which utilizes a combination of: (1) auditory stimulation, (2) visual stimulation and (3) tactile stimulation to the mouth to improve speech clarity.OPT is an important addition to traditional speech treatment methods for clients with placement and movement deficits.It is a tactile-proprioceptive teaching technique which accompanies traditional therapy. Traditional therapy is primarily auditory and visual.Clients with motor and/or sensory impairments benefit from tactile and proprioceptive components because speech is a tactile-proprioceptive act.

Oral Placement Therapy is used to improve articulator awareness, placement (dissociation, grading, and direction of movement), stability, and muscle memory; all of these are necessary for the development of speech clarity.OPT can be used with clients of many ages and ability levels. It can be incorporated into program plans for many types of speech disorders (e.g., dysarthria, apraxia of speech voice disorders, fluency disorders and post CVA clients, clients with mild-to-profound levels of hearing loss). Many of the clients who require these techniques have often received traditional auditory and visually based speech facilitation for a number of years, with minimal success. No one is at fault for the client’s difficulty in learning to produce target speech sounds.