Active clinical trials for "Speech Sound Disorder"

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.

The primary aim of this study is to develop software as a tool in speech and language therapy for the treatment of children (Portuguese and English) with phonologically based Speech Sound Disorders (SSD). Further, this project aims to test the effectiveness of this approach with two groups of preschool and school aged children with phonologically based SSD, with one group consisting of European Portuguese (EP) speakers and one group of British English (BE) speakers. Performance across the two groups will be compared. The total duration of the project will be 30 month.

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.

The aim of the present study is to examine the effectiveness of a short, highly structured parent based speech intervention program on speech development in very preterm children with a Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) at 2 years of age. The hypothesis of this study is that early intervention on speech development is effective in improving the speech development in preterm children with SSD at 2 years of age compared to a no treatment group (usual care at this age).

The promotion of language and communicative development in the early years is extremely important. Children who enter school with good language skills have better educational and economic success. This study is part of a large project across Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield Universities to determine how shared reading promotes child language development, and use this knowledge to make it an effective language boosting tool for children across the whole socio-economic spectrum. The overall project includes: observational studies to identify what language boosting behaviours are responsible for shared reading's effectiveness, and how parents from different socio-economic groups use these behaviours during shared reading; intervention studies to evaluate packages designed to train parents in the use of specific language boosting behaviours during reading; a qualitative exploration of the reasons people may not read with their children. This study will provide training to parents on how to develop their children's attention to the features of words while reading books with them. The research questions are: i) Is specific training focused on the sound properties of words during shared reading more effective at developing children's phonological awareness and language than general advice on the importance of reading with children? ii) Do children with speech sound disorder and typically developing children respond differently to intervention? iii) To what extent are differences in training implementation and effects explained by socio-economic status? Our participants will be parents and their children, aged 30-54 months, with a diagnosis of speech sound disorder. They will be recruited via speech and language therapy services in the North West. Data collection will be carried out by the research team in participants' homes, taking 3-4 hours in total over 2-3 appointments. The sessions will be audio-recorded; parents will complete questionnaires, and children's language and speech will be assessed with standardised and in-house tests.

Recent research reveals genetic and symptomatic overlap among children with speech sound disorders (i.e., those who (misarticulate more sounds than would be expected for their age) and children with dyslexia (i.e., those who struggle to learn to read). Children who have speech sound disorders as preschoolers are at risk for the later emergence of dyslexia, a risk that often reveals itself in the form of poor phonological awareness skills during the preschool period. Traditional speech therapy methods focus on articulation accuracy and do not focus on the child's more abstract knowledge of the sound system of the language. The ultimate objective of this research program is to prevent reading disability in children who present with speech sounds disorders. The relative effectiveness of different interventions to help these children achieve age-appropriate phonological processing skills prior to school entry will be investigated. It is expected that a combination of treatment approaches that focus on speech perception skills and vocabulary knowledge will have a superior impact on phonological awareness in comparison with a treatment approach that focuses solely on articulation accuracy.