Improvements in Speech of Children with Apraxia: The Efficacy of Treatment for Establishing Motor Program Organization (TEMPO^SM)

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study investigated the efficacy of Treatment for Establishing Motor Program Organization (TEMPO^SM) in childhood apraxia of speech (CAS).

Method: A mixed between- and within-participant design with multiple baselines across participants and behaviors was used to examine acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of skills. TEMPO^SM was administered in four one-hour sessions a week over a four-week period for eleven participants (ages 5 to 8), allocated to either an immediate treatment group or a wait-list control group. Acoustic and perceptual variables were measured at baseline, immediate post-treatment, and one-month post-treatment.

Results: Children demonstrated significant improvements in specific acoustic measures of segmentation and lexical stress, as well as perceptual measures of fluency, lexical stress, and speech-sound accuracy. Treatment and generalization effects were maintained one-month post-treatment with generalization to untreated stimuli.

Conclusion: TEMPO^SM was efficacious in improving segmental and suprasegmental impairments in the speech of children with CAS.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood apraxia of speech
• prosody
• lexical stress
• intervention
• speech motor programming

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the children and families who participated; graduate clinicians Roisin Bermingham, Kathy-Ann Murray, Rachel Platt, Megan Rounds, Emily Schultz, and Savanah Snook; Jill Thorson and Bill Rogers for assistance with programs for acoustic and perceptual analyses; IMPROV Lab research assistants who completed acoustic analyses; and our perceptual scorers.

Disclosure Statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. Portions of this work were presented at the 2018 Conference on Motor Speech in Savannah, Georgia, and the 2018 American Speech-Language Hearing Association Convention in Boston, Massachusetts, as well as forming part of the first author’s Master’s thesis at the University of New Hampshire.

Supplementary Material

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