Abstract
Rvachew, S., & Brosseau-Lapré, F. (2012). An input-focused intervention for children with developmental phonological disorders. Perspectives on Language Learning and Education, 19, 31–35.
Background
Usage-based theories of language development have indicated a child’s understanding of phonological patterns materializes from his or her diverse environmental exposure and use of language. When a child struggles with processing the fundamental phonological patterns of their language, as well as displays a deficit in acoustic-phonetic recognition, it is probable that he or she may have a developmental phonological disorder (DPD). Over the last two decades, there has been a major movement toward the more efficient phonological approaches to the remediation of speech-sound errors, as more and more research has indicated phonological processing errors result in speech perception, phonological awareness, and decoding deficits later in life. Rvachew and Brosseau-Lapré infer children with DPDs, “require enhanced access to high-quality, but structured, speech input as a means of improving their processing efficiency and strengthening their phonological representations” (Marchman & Fernald, 2008; Metsala & Walley, 1998). Consequently, the purpose of this study was to determine the benefits of a structured speech input program on children with DPDs.
Study
This study consisted of 64 francophone children with DPDs and was conducted over a 12-week period of time. During the initial six weeks of the program, the children each received 15 min of individual therapy per week focusing on each of three client-specific phonological goals followed by home-programming. The individual therapy sessions primarily consisted of ear training in the context of play, listening games, and story books. Once the child began to display a greater awareness of the phonological target, minimal pair activities were also incorporated into the therapy sessions.
The second 6-week portion of the program consisted of the children attending 1-hr weekly group sessions targeting the phonological awareness components of onset and rime identification, matching, and sorting. Concurrently during this time period, the parents received training on dialogic reading methods. The parents received instruction on DPDs, appropriate book selections, “see-saw” reading techniques, promotion of vocabulary development, encouragement of inferencing and predicting, and emergent literacy.
Results
The efficacy of this speech input program was measured across four conditions, with the 64 children divided into four groups of 18. The first group received intervention directly as stated above. The second group differed in that during the first 6 weeks, focus was placed on speech production practice combined with articulation therapy administered by the parents. The third group received a combination of speech perception intervention in the clinic and parent-administered focused articulation therapy at home. The final group received the same speech production focused therapy in the clinic and parent-conducted dialogic reading intervention at home. A control group of 10 children was also followed over the course of the study.
Two outcome measures were used to evaluate the efficacy of this speech input intervention. The first was a deletion task used to measure explicit phonological awareness. Of the four groups, the first group displayed the greatest improvement regarding this measure. The second group also displayed improvement in this area; however, the other two groups did not. The second outcome measure evaluated the change in articulation accuracy over the course of the program, as measured by a picture-naming test. The first, second, and third groups displayed significant improvements in the area of articulation; significant gains were not noted for the fourth group or control group.
In conclusion, input-focused intervention was shown to be equally beneficial in the development of articulatory accuracy as traditional intervention focusing on speech production practice. Furthermore, phonological awareness skills were improved the greatest using the input-focused intervention. Using the above-mentioned results, Rvachew and Brosseau-Lapré made the following recommendations regarding the selection of intervention approaches for children with DPDs:
If there is a motor-speech component to the child’s phonological disorder, a sensory motor approach is more appropriate for intervention.
Children with only residual speech-sound errors may be successfully treated using a traditional approach to intervention.
Very young children or children with small vocabularies, concomitant language difficulties, or those who display evidence of a word-based phonology would benefit from an input-focused approach.
Children who display an apprehension to talking and trying new sounds, or those who may not be stimulable for new phones over a long period of time, may also benefit from an input-focused approach as the pressure to talk is reduced.
Last, children who display concurrent phonological processing and speech-sound errors would be ideal candidates for an input-focused approach.