Medically Reviewed By Sonam Kothari, Written By Tejasvi Parekh
Oral Placement Therapy, or OPT, is a multisensory therapeutic intervention created to address difficulties in speech and feeding by providing the client with tactile and proprioceptive feedback to enhance oral motor strength.
One of the main reasons OPT is done is the need for individuals to feel the movements within their mouth as opposed to speech therapy; in it, the auditory and visual cues are used to a greater extent. This is especially so for individuals having problems with auditory or even visual stimuli alone.
In this discussion, we'll describe the basics of OPT, its uses, and the conditions it treats.
The term OPT was first coined in 2010 by Daniel and Sara Rosenfeld-Johnson. Oral Placement Therapy is an advanced technique in therapy; its goal is to develop and advance the oral motor skills necessary for clear speech production and efficient feeding.
It uses the multisensory approach primarily because it applies tactile-proprioceptive feedback. Patients can feel what they are supposed to do with their mouths, lips, or tongues to make specific movements or positions.
This set OPT apart from traditional speech therapy, which placed a greater emphasis on visual and auditory modalities. Many clients especially those who present a dual behaviour such as speech and feeding, require input in a form more nearly tangible - that is an oral physical feeling of correct placements and movements of their oral muscles.
This tactile feedback is critical as it provides the brain with some vital information to make necessary corrections and, thus, better articulation and motor control.
The OPT principle is based on the principles of Van Riper's Phonetic Placement Therapy. It uses tactile cues for a person who, for any reason, cannot respond to visual and auditory speech cues.
Children with Oral Placement Disorder, who aren't able to reproduce specific speech sounds using standard auditory or visual cues, can benefit from this.
It helps such children produce speech sounds by using tools and techniques that facilitate muscle placement.
Oral Placement Therapy is a type of speech therapy intervention that maximizes speech clarity for children diagnosed with placement and movement deficits, traditional speech therapy may not be helpful enough.
OPT uses tactile-proprioceptive techniques to target specific challenges, enhancing awareness of articulators, and improving placement, stability, and even muscle memory to overcome difficulties. Some ways these tools are used in OPT to help the child and adult alike achieve better speech include
Chewy Tubes, are designed to support children's biting and chewing processes in speech development. These are key competencies for speech. Chewy Tubes are available in different sizes and textures for individual use.
The Yellow Chewy Tube is meant for babies or those with thinner jaws who are especially sensitive to oral tactile stimulation. It's best for young children who can't open their jaws wide enough.
The Red Chewy Tube has more dough and is bigger. It is intended for use by toddlers as well as older kids and adults. Those who are recovering from oral surgery can use it. Since the hollow stem form will give more distinct practice surfaces, it will develop the ability to bite and chew.
Orange P & Qs are mainly used with babies and toddlers. The design of the tool excites the tongue and encourages lateral biting behaviour, which is integral in building up jaw control over a child's laterality, a vital factor involved in speech production. After six months, children begin to develop their lateral biting, so the tool can be used to strengthen jaw movements.
For someone who may need even more kinesthetic stimulation, the Green Chewy Tube has raised dots on the shaft. Compared to the Yellow and Red Chewy Tubes, this one is firmer and ideal for someone who would require more resistance from the stimulus of biting and chewing.
The Blue Chewy Tube is the biggest and firmest of all the Chewy Tubes. This makes it appropriate for older teenagers and adults with developmental and sensory integration disorders. Its large size gives the resistance needed to help a person with stronger jaws.
The Z Vibe is a sonic vibratory device used in oral tone building, feeding enhancement, and the encouragement of speech. Its vibratory properties deliver a range of sensations to a client's oral cavity to increase client consciousness about their oral structure, making it suitable for a speaker who has a hard time with speech production because he or she can set the evidence to the salient tactile cue.
The horn and whistle are motivational tools used in addition to the other 'classical' therapy tools. The horn kit aims to normalize oral musculature, improve speech intelligibility, and constitutes a pre-requisite for work in oral-nasal contrast. They help correct errors of articulation and enhance the production of speech sounds.
These are essential in promoting symmetrical strength and stability of the jaw, which is an important consideration for the proper production of speech sounds. The Bite Block hierarchy is conducted with these blocks to develop jaw mobility, so it seems a balanced activity about oral feeding and speech.
The heart of OPT is Straw Therapy, which encourages jaw-lip-tongue dissociation. That serves to strengthen the required oral muscles needed for clear speech across the twelve developmental stages. Using straws can enable a person to learn the coordination necessary for effective sound production in speech.
The Infant often a finger toothbrush, is used for teaching motor planning for chewing. Smoothing on one side and soft rubber bristles on the opposite side allow for an easy introduction to oral movements required for speech and feeding.
The Honey Bear Drinking Cup is a multiple tool used in tongue retraction and lingual grading. It is useful for children with the forward tongue thrust who have problems drinking out of a straw. This kind of cup helps children understand the oral movement for speech development.
The NUK Brush provides good oral motor stimulation and desensitization. It provides sensory input that will calm some persons who have oral sensitivities. Such a brush can aid children when feeding is a problem or when a child has sensory processing.
Tongue Tip Lateralization Tools are designed to induce stability of the mandible and facilitate independent tongue movements. They are tasks to prepare the child for the crossing of the midline and support lift and depression of the tongue to achieve clear speech production.
There are several interchangeable tips in the Oral Sensory Integration Kit, which provide diverse kinds of sensory inputs to the oral cavity. This kit is very effective in desensitization and aids clients suffering from sensory processing disorders in producing more speech.
Cue fading should be introduced soon after the patient uses the therapy instruments to improve their mouth posture, progressively reducing their reliance on them. The patient practices the same speech movements without using the tool during this stage. A successful result would be muscle memory so that correct placement can be achieved independently, without reliance on the tactile support provided by the tools.
Once the client can produce the correct oral placement and movement movements independently without curing, it is time to transfer them into speech production. For instance, if a tool had been used to support the client with lip rounding for /w/, /u/, or /o/ sounds, the clinician should immediately guide the client to make these sounds without using a tool.
This is considered a milestone in speech production. OPT has developed special techniques that have led to the evolution of jaw-lip-tongue dissociation, or the capacity to move your lips and tongue without using your jaw. This is essential for producing different sounds of speech.
Accuracy in the free and autonomous movement of other articulators will be ensured by strengthening the jaw and the stability that results.
OPT does not use non-speech movements such as puffed cheeks full of air, or wagging the tongue. Such movements do not produce speech, and certainly, they will not be part of OPT sessions; rather, the tiny coordination movements like that of precise speech are aimed for.
An important function of tongue elevation is tongue tip elevation capability. In OPT, vibration can contribute to stretching the tongue and creating sufficient tension to elevate the tongue tip to produce various speech sounds.
Assistive Technology: This technique is useful in instructing patients how the tongue should be positioned for the front vowels and some consonants, such as placing the tongue tip on the incisive papillae, just behind the front teeth.
OPT constructs the muscle memory for speech sounds through repetition and practice. For instance, once a tool has moulded the articulators for producing certain sounds, the therapist immediately goes straight to practising the sound without the tool.
Repetition of this nature will eventually help to reinforce in the client's brain the correct movements necessary for easy speech production independently.
OPT tools make the multi-modular approach of speech therapy work even more effectively as they focus on tactile-proprioceptive instead of just auditory and visual techniques because these look beyond oral functions and incorporate the muscular relationship to speech sounds in children suffering from various disorders.
Constant use of OPT tools helps clients build up better control over their mechanisms of speech for clearer, more effective communication.
