Efficacy of an Intervention for the Children With Severe Speech Sounds Disorders
Trial Snapshot
- Phase
- Not Applicable
- Enrollment
- 20
- Locations
- 1
- Primary Endpoint
- Percent correct for target speech sounds
Study Overview
Brief Summary
Speech sound disorders (SSDs) is one type of communication problems in children. It is a board term describing different difficulties that impact speech intelligibility. There are different types of SSDs, including motor-based disorders (e.g., dysarthria and childhood apraxia of speech [CAS]), structurally based disorders (e.g., cleft-palate), syndrome/condition-related disorders (e.g., Down), sensory-based conditions (e.g., hearing loss), and idiopathic in nature.
Among different types of SSDs in children, childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a type of motor speech disorders with symptom complex, and is always considered as severe SSDs if objective measurement of severity, percentage of consonant correct (PCC) is applied.
Evidence of different intervention approaches of CAS and SSDs have been obtained from English-speaking children. This is unknown if these approaches can be applied to languages which are different from English in terms of the sound inventory and prosody.
A treatment program for Cantonese-speaking children with childhood apraxia of speech was studied. Preliminary positive findings were obtained from two participants in an ABA single-case study. With the preliminary positive data, a higher level of evidence could be obtained from group study. The purpose of this study is to determine the efficacy of the proposed intervention for children with severe SSDs by quasi-experimental design.
Detailed Description
A treatment program for children with severe SSDs, especially childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), a type of motor speech disorders in children was proposed. The program includes syllable repetition tasks and training of core vocabularies. In the syllable repetition tasks, children are required to repeat nonsense syllables three to five times according to their sequencing abilities. This flexibility training of syllables was believed to address the underlying speech motor deficits of children with severe SSDs. The level of difficulty is increased in a systematic way to help progression of children speech skills. In the training of core vocabulary, ten vocabularies which have high functional values in children's daily communication were proposed by parents. Speech therapists are instructed to prioritize the vocabularies and practice the children with the application of Principle of Motor Learning (PML) and Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing (DTTC).
Preliminary positive findings were obtained from two participants in an single-case study. The results showed that the treatment program was able to increase the number of syllable per words, increase the speech sound accuracy, increase the complexity of syllable structure, and increase speech intelligibility.
A quasi-experimental one-group pre- and post-test design will be conducted to study the efficacy of the proposed treatment. A power calculation has been used to determine the number of participants to be recruited. Preliminary findings of the proposed treatment program was obtained. One of the two participants demonstrated statistically significant differences with medium effect size. Based on this, with the estimated medium effect size (d =0.6) with .05 alpha error probability and 0.8 power (1-beta error probability), a total of 19 participants are required.
Twenty children aged between 3 to 18 will be recruited. The specific inclusion criteria of the participants are set as follow:
- Cantonese as the main language input
- No oral structural abnormality
- No hearing loss
- No diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders
- No major behavioral problem
Study Design
- Study Type
- Interventional
- Allocation
- Na
- Intervention Model
- Single Group
- Primary Purpose
- Treatment
- Masking
- None
Eligibility Criteria
- Ages
- 3 Years to 18 Years (Child, Adult)
- Sex
- All
- Accepts Healthy Volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria
- •Aged between 3 to 18 Cantonese as the main language input No oral structural abnormality No hearing loss No diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders No major behavioural problem
Exclusion Criteria
- Not provided
Arms & Interventions
Children with SSD
Participants will receive a piloted treatment programme for children with severe speech sound disorders, especially childhood apraxia of speech.
Intervention: Treatment for Children with Severe Speech Sound Disorders (Behavioral)
Outcomes
Primary Outcomes
Percent correct for target speech sounds
Time Frame: 6 weeks treatment
Secondary Outcomes
- Speech intelligibility(6 weeks treatment)
Investigators
Michael Tong
Chairman, Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery
Chinese University of Hong Kong