Using ultrasound visual biofeedback to treat persistent primary speech sound disorders

Abstract

Growing evidence suggests that speech intervention using visual biofeedback may benefit people for whom visual skills are stronger than auditory skills (for example, the hearing-impaired population), especially when the target articulation is hard to describe or see. Diagnostic ultrasound can be used to image the tongue and has recently become more compact and affordable leading to renewed interest in it as a practical, non-invasive visual biofeedback tool. In this study, we evaluate its effectiveness in treating children with persistent speech sound disorders that have been unresponsive to traditional therapy approaches. A case series of seven different children (aged 6–11) with persistent speech sound disorders were evaluated. For each child, high-speed ultrasound (121 fps), audio and lip video recordings were made while probing each child’s specific errors at five different time points (before, during and after intervention). After intervention, all the children made significant progress on targeted segments, evidenced by both perceptual measures and changes in tongue-shape.

• Ultrasound
• visual biofeedback
• speech sound disorders

Acknowledgments

The authors thank primarily the children and their parents who attended weekly therapy sessions and follow-up recordings. Thanks are also due to the Speech and Language Therapists who referred the children and to Steve Cowen for technical assistance with the ultrasound recordings and to Zoe Roxburgh for help with some of the data labelling.

Declarations of interest

The first author was supported by an EPSRC grant (Grant no. EP/I027696/1).