Auditory discrimination
It is the belief of the authors of NDP3 that children with DVD have a primary difficulty with motor programming and need a therapy approach that focuses on speech output. However, it is acknowledged that some children need to also work on input skills and it is recommended that output and input skills should be worked on “back to back”. This is different to traditional dyspraxia therapy approaches where it was believed that auditory discrimination was not an area of difficulty for children with DVD.
Phonological awareness
Although NDP3 is not specifically designed to focus on phonological awareness skills, the materials make it very suitable for PA tasks and activities are included at appropriate levels within the therapy approach, e.g.: sound and syllable blending, syllable segmentation at CVCV and multi-syllabic word levels and onset-rime segmentation at CVC level. Activities, tasks and games involving phonological awareness are included in Appendix 6 of the manual.
Meaningful minimal pair contrasts
NDP3 is not specifically designed as a meaningful minimal pair approach, but since the aim of therapy is to build a contrastive speech system at each level of word complexity, minimal pairs are inevitably involved. The picture cards and worksheets provide many minimal pair contrasts.
Oro-motor programmes
NDP3 (2012) includes guidance on eliciting movements required to produce specific features of articulation. Occasionally, oro-motor skills may need to be introduced in isolation, but they are very soon linked to speech sound production. Therefore NDP3 is very different to oro-motor approaches which are purely designed to develop oro-motor skills.