Personalised Dysarthria Therapy for Children and Young People with Cerebral Palsy
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Personalised Speech and Language Therapy for Children and Young People with Cerebral Palsy using Acoustic and Phonological Analytics
IRAS ID
307437
Contact name
Lindsay Pennington
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Newcastle University
Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier
N/A, N/A
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 11 months, 10 days
Research summary
The study will test the effects of individualising the Speech Systems Approach – a speech and language therapy programme developed to help children with cerebral palsy speak more clearly. The programme will be individualised according to children's pre-therapy speech characteristics.
I will study 15 children, aged between 5 and 19 years, with cerebral palsy who have the motor speech disorder dysarthria. Each child will receive six weeks of individual therapy, delivered online three times a week. Children's speech will be recorded pre-, during, and post-therapy. Children will be recorded repeating single words, describing pictures and producing a vowel sound ("ah").
Speech waveforms and spectrograms will be created from the recordings. Waveforms and spectrograms are visual representations of sound. A speech waveform shows the pitch and loudness of a sound. A spectrogram provides more complex information, including the voicing (the extent of vocal fold opening) and formants (represents the size and shape of the vocal tract) of a sound over time. Acoustic measures will be taken from the waveforms and spectrograms to calculate changes in the children's speech which may not yet be heard by ear. The prompts and instructions used in the intervention will be decided from analysis of these acoustic measures.
Adults who have no experience of interacting with people who have speech difficulties will act as listeners. Listeners will listen to the pre- and post-therapy recordings and transcribe the words they hear. Listeners will rate the intelligibility of the recordings using a Likert scale ranging from one (never intelligible) to seven (always intelligible). Listener transcriptions will be compared to the children's target productions. The percentage of words understood correctly (percentage intelligibility) will be determined.
Effectiveness of the therapy will be determined by comparison of children’s intelligibility pre- and post-therapy. Acoustic measures taken during therapy will show when and how children’s speech characteristics changed.REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
22/EM/0064
Date of REC Opinion
13 Apr 2022
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion