The Effectiveness of Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment in Improving Communication in Children with Cerebral Palsy: A Randomized Controlled Trial

ABSTRACT

Cerebral palsy (CP) is a movement disorder and majority of children with CP have communication impairments which impact participation with this population. Rapid Syllable Transition Treatment (ReST) is a motor speech intervention primarily for children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS). A recent pilot study in which ReST was trialed with children with CP showed improved speech performance. Therefore, a single blind randomized controlled trial to compare ReST to usual care with 14 children with moderate-to-severe CP and dysarthria was conducted. ReST was provided on telehealth. ANCOVA with 95% confidence intervals indicated significant group differences in favor of ReST in speech accuracy (F = 5.1, p = .001), intelligibility (F = 2.8, p = .02) and communicative participation on both the FOCUS (F = 2, p = .02) and Intelligibility in Context Scale (F = 2.4, p = .04). ReST was found to be more effective than usual care.

KEYWORDS:

• Cerebral palsy
• motor speech intervention
• rapid syllable transition treatment (ReST)
• speech therapy
• telehealth

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the children and their families who participated in the study.

The authors would also like to thank Dr Maryane Gomez, Annabel Webb, and the University of Sydney Student Speech Pathologists Brianna Horn, Tiffany Huynh, Han-Cun Lin, Jazmine Liubinskas, Carmen Mak, Elizabeth Morriss, Ella Todd, Hannah Li Ern Wee, and Youran Bella Wu for their contributions to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. IDT is used to refer to the intervention approach named in the studies by Pennington et al. 2006⁶², 2010⁶³, 2013¹⁰ as the Speech Systems Approach.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.