About Speech Motor Chaining

"Speech Motor Chaining helps my students generalize their sounds quickly. My students love saying their target sounds with different intonations - they think it's really fun!" - Alexis C.


Speech Motor Chaining guides the clinician in navigating the multiple decisions needed to take a client from establishment to generalization. The treatment automatically adjusts practice difficulty based on a client’s performance during the session, by adapting these principles of motor learning:

  • Linguistic complexity of the practice trial (from syllables to sentences)
  • Ordered or random grouping of trials
  • Prosodic variation of trials
  • Amount of clinician feedback
  • Amount of detail in the clincian's feedback
  • Amount of self-monitoring

The Speech Production Lab

We are a team of speech-language pathologists and researchers at Syracuse University dedicated to improving evidence-based practice for speech sound disorders.

Jonathan L. Preston, PhD CCC-SLP

Director

Jon is an internationally-recognized researcher in Speech Sound Disorders and the chief scientist behind Speech Motor Chaining.

Megan C. Leece, MA CCC-SLP

Research SLP/Lab Manager

Megan is a certified speech-language pathologist with extensive clinical expertise in speech sound disorder intervention as well as research expertise in clinical trials.

Molly Beiting, PhD CCC-SLP

Post Doctoral Researcher

Molly is a certified speech-language pathologist and pediatric speech researcher with special interests in childhood apraxia of speech and autism.

Nina R. Benway, PhD CCC-SLP

Research Scientist

Nina is a certified speech-language pathologist with expertise in clinical speech technology, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Nicole Caballero, MS CCC-SLP

PhD Student

Nicole is a certified speech-language pathologist and PhD student. Her research interests include speech sound disorders, particularly the assessment and treatment of children with childhood apraxia of speech.

Benedette Herbst, MS CCC-SLP

PhD Student

Benny is a certified speech-language pathologist researching how Speech Motor Chaining can be used in different service delivery models.