Efficacy of an Intervention for the Children With Severe Speech Sounds Disorders

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.