Clinical scope
What Articarry is designed for, and what it is not
Articarry supports word-level articulation and phonological practice between sessions. It is built for the kinds of difficulty an SLP working with school-age children sees most often. This page is the plain statement of where the tool fits and where it doesn't.
What it supports
- Articulation difficulties on the late-acquired English sounds (/r/, /l/, /s/, /z/, /sh/, /ch/, /j/, /th/) and the major blend families.
- Phonological pattern difficulties addressed at the word level: fronting, stopping, cluster reduction, gliding, final-consonant deletion.
- Spiral re-practice across word positions and across utterance levels as the child progresses.
- A record of what happened between sessions: recordings the clinician can listen to, plus a marker showing where the engine drew the ear.
What it is not designed for
These belong with specialists or in techniques Articarry does not deliver. Articarry can still be used as a supplemental articulation-practice surface alongside the primary intervention a child needs, but the primary work happens elsewhere.
- Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS)
- CAS needs tactile + dynamic cueing techniques (DTTC, PROMPT, ReST). Articarry's recorder-based loop does not deliver those.
- Fluency disorders
- Stuttering needs fluency-shaping or operant-contingency approaches (Lidcombe, Van Riper modification).
- Voice and resonance disorders
- Hoarseness, breathiness, pitch, hypernasality and related difficulties are outside the articulation focus. Refer to a voice-specialist colleague.
- Dysarthria
- Motor-execution difficulties from neuromuscular causes need targeted motor-speech intervention.
- Language-primary difficulties
- When vocabulary, grammar, or comprehension is the primary concern, articulation work is secondary. A clinician's comprehensive language workup comes first.
- Hearing loss
- Articarry does not replace amplification or audiology follow-up. Coordinate with the child's audiologist.
- Orofacial myofunctional patterns
- Tongue thrust, mouth breathing, and related patterns often need a myofunctional therapist's involvement.
A note on what Articarry doesn't claim
Articarry is a practice and visibility surface. It is not a clinical-scoring instrument and it is not a diagnostic tool. The clinician's judgment is the floor of every decision the product surfaces. The recorder gives the clinician what happened between sessions; the clinician decides what to do about it.