Phonological Disorders: Metaphon Approach

What is Metaphon? Metaphon as a treatment approach was first developed in 1980s by Janet Howell and Elizabeth Dean when they noticed that the use of minimal pairs contrasts was not giving the necessary changing in the child’s phonological system, this led them to question the metaphonological skills of those children, which means ‘What do children with phonological disorders know about sounds’?. From this point, Metaphon approach was developed to target phonological processes mainly by the use of metaphonological skills to improve child’s cognitive awareness of the properties of the sound system, and the implementation of metalinguistic awareness tasks to develop communicative effectiveness.
Metaphon approach evolved from two main
Processes that cause more disruption and badly affect intelligibility should be given priority.
4. Sounds available to the child, both in spontaneous and imitative basis, play a role in the selection process, as sounds that are not in the inventory but can be imitated are given priority.

Procedures: Metaphone treatment approach consists of two phases; the first phase is designed to formulate awareness to the sound system. The second phase is to transfer and apply the metalinguistic skills learned in the first phase in communicative situations. In other words, the first phase is for developing phonological awareness and the second one is for developing communicative awareness.

□ Phase one therapy: Developing phonological awareness. It is considered as the most important phase in the treatment and the most distinct of any other phonological treatment programs. Its goal is to develop an awareness of the sounds properties and their interrelationships, by capturing the child’s interest in the phonology of the targeted language, altering the child to the sound’s properties and their contrastive potentials, showing that contrasts between sounds convey meanings, and facilitating the child’s knowledge that these features can be manipulated when
Visual cues are also given here.

► For syllable structure processes:

→ Concept level: for initial or final consonant deletion, concepts such as “beginning” and “end” are introduced and exemplified by the nose of alligator for the beginning and the tail for the end. For cluster simplification processes suitable contrasts could be used such as one horse in front of wagon, two engines pulling the train, or three dogs pulling a sled.
→ Syllable level: describe syllables that contain the targeted contrast by using concepts learned in the concept level, for example head and body and tail are used to introduce (CVC), but head and body only are used to introduce (CV).
→ Word level: introduce minimal difference in pairs of words being contrasted, and the child makes judgment on the concept used in the word, for example the child may describe the word (rip) with one train, and the word (trip) with two connected trains, as for the cluster.

□ Phase two therapy: Developing phonological communicative