Establishing a sound instructional plan follows careful and thorough assessment. Assessment should illuminate underlying deviations in physiological aspects of speech production and/or in phonological, semantic, and syntactic components of the language system.

The key to successful intervention is to identify instructional strategies that effectively alter faulty patterns of production.

Determining whether production errors are motoric or linguistic is often difficult. Whereas segmental aspects of speech strongly influence intelligibility, substantial aberrations in suprasegmental aspects may reveal underlying insufficiencies in the coordination of respiration, phonation, and articulation. These underlying aberrations may impair the realization of fluent coarticulated speech. When this occurs, efforts to improve phonetic production should be secondary to focused instruction on developing coordinated respiratory, phonatory, and articulatory aspects of production. Modifying physiological patterns may enhance production across a broad class of phonemes.