The Impact of Beatboxing on the Management of Individuals With Residual Speech Errors

This project will study the effect of practicing speech sounds via beatboxing on speech accuracy, engagement in therapy, and functional outcomes for older children and adolescents with speech sound disorders (SSDs). Though SSDs exhibited by young children are often considered, SSDs are among the most frequent communication disorders in school-aged and adolescent children. SSDs can persist until adulthood. Individuals exhibit residual speech errors (RSE) when speech sounds are produced incorrectly after the age of eight, the age at which speech production is expected to be error-free. Common RSE include /r/, /s/, and /z/, all of which have high frequency in American English.

Beatboxing is a unique manipulation of the speech mechanism in which the individual creates repetitive, percussive and other instrumental sounds by actually being the instrument. Beatboxing is engaging and increasingly found in a variety of musical contexts and mainstream culture. The broad objective of this investigation is to explore the impact of beatboxing as an intervention tool on the speech produced and the functional outcomes attained by children with RSE compared to a traditional articulation therapy approach.The effect of a beatboxing intervention approach (BEAT-Speech) will be compared to traditional articulation therapy and employs a two-group pretest-posttest design. Specifically, the research aims to 1) assess the impact of beatboxing on speech sound production accuracy and amount of targets produced during therapy; 2) examine the relative level of client engagement of individuals exposed to beatboxing intervention; and 3) explore influences of beatboxing experiences on communication, activities, and participation in social and daily interactions.