Online Assessment and Enhancement of Auditory Perception for Speech Sound Errors: BiOfeedback, Online for Sibilant Treatment
Montclair State University
Summary
The goal of this clinical trial is to evaluate the efficacy of sibilant biofeedback treatment delivered via telepractice in six children ages 8:0-17;11 who present with distortions of /s/. The main questions it aims to answer are: * Primary hypothesis: Biofeedback treatment for sibilants delivered via telepractice will produce positive gains compared to a no-treatment baseline phase. * Secondary hypothesis: Participants will experience positive changes in social-emotional well-being after receiving biofeedback treatment for sibilants as reported by the participants and their guardians. Following the initial evaluation, participants will be randomly assigned to transition from baseline to treatment at one of seven possible points, ranging from 4-10 baseline sessions in which /s/ production will be probed but not treated. All participants will then receive 20, 1-hour biofeedback treatment sessions over 10 weeks with a certified Speech-Language Pathologist via teletherapy, followed by three maintenance sessions.
Description
Study 2 will evaluate children with residual speech sound disorder affecting /s/ (n = 6). Both male and female children will be recruited. Participants must be between 8;0 and 17;11 years of age at the time of enrollment. Randomization. Following the initial evaluation to determine eligibility, participants will be randomly assigned to transition from the baseline to the treatment condition at one of 7 possible points, ranging from 4 to 10 baseline sessions in which /s/ production will be probed but not treated. All participants will then receive 20 sessions of /s/ production training over 10…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 8–17 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- No
Inclusion Criteria: * Age between 8;0 and 17;11 years at the time of enrollment * English as the dominant language (must have begun learning English by age 3, per parent report) * Passes pure-tone hearing screening at 30 dB hearing level * Passes brief examination of oral structure and function * Less than 30% accuracy, based on consensus across 2 trained listeners, on a probe list eliciting fricative /s, z/ in various phonetic contexts at the word level * No more than 3 sounds other than /s/ in error on the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-3 (GFTA-3) * Diagnosis of ADHD, learning disabil…
Interventions
- BehavioralVisual-acoustic biofeedback for Sibilants
Participants will view a real-time FFT spectrum and will be cued to match a visual target for /s/ where the spectral energy is concentrated to the right side of the display, primarily in the 5000-10,000 Hz region of the spectrum. Practice will occur in blocks of 10 consecutive trials on the same item (e.g., 10 /sa/), after which a new item will be addressed (e.g., 10 /se/). Within each block, the clinician will provide qualitative (knowledge of performance) feedback as prompted by the research team's custom open-source software, Challenge Point Program (CPP). The CPP software prompts clinician actions such as delivery of knowledge of performance (KP) feedback. Following each block of ten trials, the software automatically tallies the scores entered by the clinician and uses the summed scores to make adaptive changes in practice difficulty.
Location
- Montclair State UniversityBloomfield, New Jersey