Which objective reflects a linguistic approach to treatment?

• A. The child will produce voiceless alveolar sibilants correctly in unstructured conversation.
• B. The child will recognize and identify phonetic distortions of his or her error sound.
• C. The child will contrast alveolar stops with velar stops in meaningful word pairs.
• D. The child will coarticulate stop plus liquid clusters as easily as other children of the same age.

Answer: (C)

A linguistic approach to treatment focuses on teaching sounds as part of the language’s phonemic system by reinforcing contrasts in meaningful word contexts. Choosing to have the child contrast alveolar stops with velar stops in meaningful word pairs directly targets how different phonemes function to distinguish words, which is the heart of phonology—the child learns to produce and perceive distinct sounds as distinct units within real language. The other options emphasize production of a specific sound in spontaneous speech, identification of distortions, or motor ease of sequences, which align more with articulation, perceptual training, or motor practice than with teaching phonemic contrasts in context.