Age-related Correlates of Treatment for Late-acquired Sounds (ARC)

University of Wyoming

Status: Completed

Conditions: Phonology Impairment; Speech Sound Disorder; Phonological Disorder; Speech Disorders; Articulation Disorders in Children; Developmental Phonological Disorder; Articulation Disorders, Developmental; Phonology Disorder; Speech Delay

Treatments: Behavioral: phonologic treatment; Behavioral: articulation therapy

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03663972

20180510BK01978

Details and patient eligibility

About

Late-acquired sounds, such as /r/ are difficult to learn and many children experience persistent errors on these sounds. The purpose of the present study is to determine whether treating these sounds earlier in the child's life may result in better outcomes.

Full description

Late-acquired sounds, such as /r/ are difficult to learn and many children experience persistent errors on these sounds. However, these sounds are often treated later in a child's life because they are not expected to be fully acquired until quite late--age 7-8 for some sounds. This practice places treatment in a time of the child's development in which they struggle to learn new sounds.The purpose of the present study is to determine whether treating these sounds earlier in the child's life may result in better outcomes, and to examine treatment efficacy and efficiency for two methods of treatment.

Enrollment: 16 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 4 to 8 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusionary Criteria:

• Normal Hearing
• Typical Receptive Language
• Speech Sound Disorder
• No motor speech impairment
• Typical non-verbal intelligence
• Produces at least one late-acquired sound with <7% accuracy
• Monolingual English-speaking
• Typical in terms of motoric and neurological development

Exclusionary Criteria:

• Neurological disorder
• Hearing loss
• Nonverbal IQ < 16th percentile

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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16 participants in 2 patient groups

Motoric Arm

Active Comparator group

Description:

Children will participate in an intervention based on traditional articulation approaches to speech therapy.

Treatment:

Behavioral: articulation therapy

Phonologic Arm

Active Comparator group

Description:

Children will receive intervention that targets the conceptual representation of sounds.

Treatment:

Behavioral: phonologic treatment