Communication disorders, namely speech sound disorders, are the most common disorders in the pediatric population across the United State. These disorders are characterized by the inability to produce age-appropriate sounds at various levels of difficulty, most noticeably in conversation. Children may exhibit deficits with groups of sounds – phonological process disorder – or with specific sounds – articulation disorder. These deficits can be attributed to a myriad of factors, such as gender, birth order, or hearing loss. Children with speech sound disorders are at an increased risk for experiencing anxiety, low self-esteem, and frustration secondary to difficulties with communicating effectively with both familiar and unfamiliar conversational partners. Additionally, these students’ academic and social functioning may be negatively impacted in the educational setting. As there are a number of potential negative adverse effects associated with having a speech sound disorder, seeking assistance from a speech language pathologist (SLP) is paramount. As experts in communication, these individuals are uniquely trained to eliminate or reduce the presence of articulation errors; by providing direct instruction, as well as strategies to teachers and family members, SLPs play a vital role in abating the aforementioned experiences had by school-age children. The paired stimuli approach, introduced in 1971 by John V Irwin and Alan J Weston, is one of many treatment methods available to SLPs. This intervention is based on the idea that the phonetic context of a sound plays a significant role in whether the sound is produced correctly or incorrectly. By identifying contexts in which sounds are produced correctly, skills can be generalized to misarticulated contexts while simultaneously promoting self-monitoring skills. Despite early investigations indicating favorable outcomes such as decreased therapy time and improved conversational intelligibility, the paired stimuli approach is one the least used treatment strategies among SLPs in the United States. This underutilization may be attributed to the paucity of research supporting the efficacy of this intervention; moreover, to date, the majority of investigations completed on the topic have involved one or both of the developers. This investigation seeks to provide current research on the efficacy of this treatment approach in children. As the paired stimuli approach addresses only the initial and final positions of words, the secondary purpose is to determine what impact this method has on the remediation of articulation errors in the medial position of words.
