What outcomes indicate therapy gains across trials in AOS rehabilitation?

• A. Reductions in articulatory error rate, increased intelligibility, and improved consistency across trials, using standardized probes and goal attainment scaling.
• B. Increased number of therapy sessions regardless of performance.
• C. Only subjective clinician impressions of progress.
• D. Exclusive improvement in reading ability.

Answer: (C)

When assessing gains from AOS rehabilitation, focus is on objective, repeatable changes in speech performance across practice trials. Reductions in articulatory error rate show that productions are becoming more accurate. Increased intelligibility reflects that listeners can understand the speaker more reliably, which is a practical measure of real-world communication. Improved consistency across trials indicates that these improvements are stable and not just one-off successes. Using standardized probes and goal attainment scaling provides a consistent way to quantify these changes across sessions and individuals, making the results reliable and comparable.

Relying only on subjective clinician impressions can be misleading because impressions can be influenced by expectations or memory and may not capture whether improvements hold across different contexts. Other options miss the essential link to actual speech-motor performance: more therapy sessions without demonstrating performance gains doesn’t prove improvement, and focusing on reading ability measures a different skill set that isn’t a direct index of articulatory motor control.