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Fast ForWord uses computerized exercises in which children identify computer-generated speech sounds (although the latest versions of the product apparently includes others kinds of computerized training as well). Participants spend 30 to 100 minutes a day, five days a week, for four to 16 weeks using the products In the speech-sound drills, the training program starts off with sounds that have been altered by computer processing. These processed sounds preserve the frequency content of normal speech sounds, but are slowed down and have artificially exaggerated differences. These changes make the task easier for children with slower than normal temporal processing, but paradoxically are more difficult to discriminate for temporal processing normals. As the subject progresses, these differences are reduced to make the games more challenging.
The premise of this approach is that the drills help students with a wide range of language problems develop enhanced phonological awareness, and that this enhanced awareness will have numerous benefits for their language functioning, including especially reading. The method of utilizing exaggerated differences in training a person to tell two things apart is commonly referred to in psychology as "fading". Fading has been widely used beginning in the 1950s in many areas of behavioral research and treatment, including animal learning, behavioral therapy of retarded individuals, and problems with perception of speech sounds.
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