The impact of age on the treatment of late-acquired sounds in children with speech sound disorders

ABSTRACT

The question of ‘when’ to treat speech sounds is often posed in the context of normative data. The new normative data suggest that speech sounds such as /ɹ/ and /l/ are acquired earlier than previously thought. The present study compared the treatment of late-acquired sounds between two age groups of English-speaking children: Young children (4–5) and Old children (7–8). Eight monolingual children with speech sound disorder (SSD) participated in the study. Each child received a criterion-based, standardised, two-phase therapy protocol. Treatment efficacy was measured by examining children’s accuracy on real world speech probes. Treatment efficiency was measured by calculating the number of sessions required to meet the exit criterion and the mean session duration. For treatment efficacy, young children learned treated sounds as effectively as oldchildren did. For treatment efficiency, both groups required a comparable number of sessions, but young children required longer sessions than old children. The results suggest that delaying treatment of individual speech sounds is unnecessary and that a range of sounds should be considered as potential treatment targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech sound disorders
• treatment
• normative data
• articulation

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the schools and families who participated in this study, as well as the speech-language pathologists who referred children.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The rationale for the use of these ages as ‘young’ and ‘old’ is provided in the participant section of the methods.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders under grant number 5T32DC000052–17; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103432. This study was registered as a clinical trial 10 September 2018 under identifier NCT03663972.