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Intensive Speech Motor Chaining Treatment for Residual Speech Sound Disorders

ConditionSpeech Sound Disorder
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phasePhase 1, Phase 2
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age9-17
SponsorSyracuse University

About this trial

The goal of this randomized-controlled trial is to compare distributed treatment schedules and intensive treatment schedules in 84 school-age children with residual speech sound disorders. The main question it aims to answer is:

* How does intensive and distributed treatment affect speech sound learning in residual speech sound disorder?

Some participants will be treated with a traditional Distributed schedule of 2 sessions per weeks for 8 weeks (16 hours total), whereas others will be treated with an Intensive schedule and will complete 16 hours of treatment in 4 weeks.

Eligibility criteria

This trial does not accept healthy volunteers

Qualifiers

Must speak American English as a dominant language.

Must have began learning English by at least the age of 3 years.

Must be between 9;0 to 17;11 years of age.

Must have reported difficulty with /ɹ/ and/or /s/ production

Disqualifiers

Must have no known history of autism spectrum disorder, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, permanent hearing loss, or brain injury.

Must not have current cleft palate or voice disorder.

Trial design

Design model

Parallel

Treatments tested in this trial

  • Speech Motor Chaining

    Behavioral

    Sessions begin with Pre-practice to elicit target sounds, with verbal cueing and shaping strategies. During Structured Practice, items are practice in blocks of 6 consecutive trials (with systematic increases in difficulty), and our web-based software will manipulate the principles of motor learning, including the stimulus prompt, the participant's production, analysis of the clinician's rating, feedback prompts for the clinician, and the variability present in the practice trial. Randomized Practice will also be guided by the software and includes all linguistic levels that were produced correctly during Structured Practice, with items presented in random order.

Treatment groups

84 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groups
Group A: Intensive TreatmentExperimental treatment 1 intervention
Group B: Distributed TreatmentExperimental treatment 1 intervention

Trial outcomes

Primary outcomes

1

Change in percent correct for treated sound, rated by blinded listeners.

To assess generalization of treatment gains to untreated words, participants will read a 200-word probe list eliciting the treated sound (/ɹ/ or /s/). Stimuli in each probe will be presented individually in randomized order. No auditory models will be provided; for children with reading difficulty, semantic cues will be provided to elicit the intended word. Individual words will be isolated from the audio record of each word probe and presented in randomized order for binary rating (correct/incorrect) by listeners who are blind to treatment condition and time point (but will see the written representation of each target word). We will use the change in percent correct as our primary measure of perceptually rated accuracy.

Time frame
Before the initiation of treatment and again 10 weeks later.

Secondary outcomes

1

Proportion of responders and non-responders in each group.

A chi-square test will be used to analyze the proportion of responders and non-responders (i.e., those above/below 15% change on the probes) in each group.

Time frame
10 weeks after the start of treatment.
2

Survey evaluating impacts of speech disorder on participants' social, emotional, and academic well-being.

This survey asks parents and participants to report the impact of speech disorder on their child's/their social, emotional, and academic well-being. Parents and participants are asked to select a number from 1 to 5 (1 = Strongly disagree, 3 = Neutral, 5 = Strongly agree). For all questions, a higher score indicates a greater degree of negative impact of speech disorder on social, emotional, or academic well-being.

Time frame
Before the initiation of treatment and again 10 weeks later.

Other outcomes

Sponsors and contacts

Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.

Syracuse University

Lead sponsor

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Collaborator

State University of New York - Upstate Medical University

Collaborator

National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)

Collaborator

Source ClinicalTrials.gov
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