Speech therapy in adolescents with Down syndrome: In pursuit of communication as a fundamental human right

Abstract

Purpose: The achievement of speech intelligibility by persons with Down syndrome facilitates their participation in society. Denial of speech therapy services by virtue of low cognitive skills is a violation of their fundamental human rights as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in general and in Article 19 in particular. Here, we describe the differential response of an adolescent with Down syndrome to three speech therapy interventions and demonstrate the use of a single subject randomisation design to identify effective treatments for children with complex communication disorders.

Method: Over six weeks, 18 speech therapy sessions were provided with treatment conditions randomly assigned to targets and sessions within weeks, specifically comparing auditory-motor integration prepractice and phonological planning prepractice to a control condition that included no prepractice. All treatments involved high intensity practice of nonsense word targets paired with tangible referents.

Result: A measure of generalisation from taught words to untaught real words in phrases revealed superior learning in the auditory-motor integration condition.

Conclusion: The intervention outcomes may serve to justify the provision of appropriate supports to persons with Down syndrome so that they may achieve their full potential to receive information and express themselves.

Keywords:

• Down syndrome
• speech sound disorder
• speech therapy
• single subject randomisation design
• Article 19
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• United Nations
• speech-language pathology
• intervention

Acknowledgements

We thank the family that participated in the research project. We are also grateful for the assistance of students and research assistants including Lizzie Carolan, Omar Obregozo Zalava, Melanie Orellana, Pegah Athari and Alexandre Herbay.

Declaration of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a McGill Faculty of Medicine Summer Research Bursary awarded to the second author and the Ruth Ratner Miller Foundation and the Centre for Research in Brain, Language and Music.