Intervention for Residual Speech Errors in Adolescents and Adults: A Systematised Review
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics
Shields, R., & Hopf, S. C. (2024).
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 38(3), 203-226.
This systematic review investigates the effects of intervention on outcomes for adolescents and adults with residual speech errors.
No funding received
Not stated
Peer-reviewed articles and theses
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<div>Traditional interventions improved errors for some participants but did not fully resolve errors. Greater benefit was seen when traditional approaches followed a period of instrumental intervention. Traditional therapy was typically less effective for individuals with perceptual deficits.</div>
<div>When auditory perceptual training was incorporated into therapy, participants made gains in production accuracy and generalization to untrained words and contexts. Findings should be interpreted with caution due to limited sample sizes.</div>
<div>Findings for treatment that incorporated ultrasound visual biofeedback were mixed. Some participants improved, some made only weak improvement, and for some this approach showed no effect. Similarly, some continued to make gains after the treatment period ended while others did not continue to generalize.</div>
<div>With visual acoustic biofeedback, 87% of participants had a moderate-to-strong response to treatment. Gains typically did not generalize outside of the therapy setting.</div>
<div>Five studies of electropalatography showed improvement for 7/7 participants.</div>
<div>One study of electromagnetic articulography (i.e., OptiSpeech) showed improvement for 13/16 participants.</div>
<div>Ten studies incorporated the challenge-point framework to inform task complexity. One demonstrated generalization of gains while nine had inconclusive results.</div>
<div>Five studies incorporated cues regarding prosodic variation. All 18 participants demonstrated production gains, but it was inconclusive whether prosodic variation had an impact.</div>
<div>One study investigated the use of an internal versus external attentional focus. For participants in this study who made gains, attentional focus did not appear to influence these gains.</div>
<div>"Across studies, the dosage of intervention, that is the number of teaching episodes during an intervention session, did not have a clear impact on its effectiveness; however, the intensity of treatment delivery, that is the frequency and duration of intervention sessions, did" (p. 217). For participants who received treatment two or more times per week, or participated in a treatment program that included home practice, 85/90 made significant gains and generalization. Participants who attended weekly sessions made gains in treatment, but only some achieved generalization.</div>
