Ball State University

The relationship among six functionally misarticulating preschool children's phoneme-specific stimulability skills, the choice of treatment targets (i.e., stimulable or nonstimulable sounds), and generalization of correct sound production was explored in this prospective study. Each subject [age range of 4:11 (years:months) to 5:61 was taught to produce [r] and one other sound that was absent from his or her phonetic inventory using a contrasting-minimal-pairs production ap-proach. A multiple baseline across behaviors single-subject research design provided experi-mental control. For 86 % of the 28 monitored sounds, generalization was consistent with pretreatment stimulability skills; production of stimulable sounds tended to improve regardless of treatment target. These results suggest that nonstimulable sounds are likely to require direct treatment; thus, generalization probe responses may be maximized by treating nonstimulable sounds rather than stimulable sounds. KEY WORDS: stimulablity, generalization, articulation/phonologIcal disorders, interven-tion, imitation Stimulability has been defined, measured, and interpreted in many ways over the past 50 years (for review, see Diedrich, 1983; Madison, 1979). Moreover, stimulabilit