Speech-language pathologists’ practices regarding assessment, analysis, target selection, intervention, and service delivery for children with speech sound disorders

Abstract

A survey of 231 Australian speech-language pathologists (SLPs) was undertaken to describe practices regarding assessment, analysis, target selection, intervention, and service delivery for children with speech sound disorders (SSD). The participants typically worked in private practice, education, or community health settings and 67.6% had a waiting list for services. For each child, most of the SLPs spent 10-40 min in pre-assessment activities, 30-60 min undertaking face-to-face assessments, and 30-60 min completing paperwork after assessments. During an assessment SLPs typically conducted a parent interview, single-word speech sampling, collected a connected speech sample, and used informal tests. They also determined children's stimulability and estimated intelligibility. With multilingual children, informal assessment procedures and English-only tests were commonly used and SLPs relied on family members or interpreters to assist. Common analysis techniques included determination of phonological processes, substitutions-omissions-distortions-additions (SODA), and phonetic inventory. Participants placed high priority on selecting target sounds that were stimulable, early developing, and in error across all word positions and 60.3% felt very confident or confident selecting an appropriate intervention approach. Eight intervention approaches were frequently used: auditory discrimination, minimal pairs, cued articulation, phonological awareness, traditional articulation therapy, auditory bombardment, Nuffield Centre Dyspraxia Programme, and core vocabulary. Children typically received individual therapy with an SLP in a clinic setting. Parents often observed and participated in sessions and SLPs typically included siblings and grandparents in intervention sessions. Parent training and home programs were more frequently used than the group therapy. Two-thirds kept up-to-date by reading journal articles monthly or every 6 months. There were many similarities with previously reported practices for children with SSD in the US, UK, and the Netherlands, with some (but not all) practices aligning with current research evidence.

Involvement of parents in intervention for childhood speech sound disorders: a review of the evidence

“…Surveys of paediatric speech and language therapists (SLTs) indicate that children with SSD comprise more than 40% of clinicians’ caseloads, with over 40 000 children in the UK referred annually (Broomfield and Dodd 2004b, Joffe and Pring ). This trend is also apparent internationally, with SLTs in Australia, the United States and the Netherlands indicating that children with SSD form nearly half a typical caseload (McLeod and Baker , Brumbaugh and Smit , Priester et al . ).…”

“…, Joffe and Pring , McLeod and Baker ). In Australia, these surveys have shown that parents are involved in a range of intervention tasks, including observing the SLT providing intervention and directly providing intervention to their child (McLeod and Baker , Watts Pappas et al . ).…”

“…). However, the most common way that these SLTs involve parents in intervention services is through completing tasks at home, with at least 95% of SLTs indicating that they adopt this method of practice (McLeod and Baker , Watts Pappas et al . ).…”

Percepção da inteligibilidade e gravidade do desvio fonológico por fonoaudiólogos e leigos

“…Studies demonstrate that it is important to analyze different groups of judges in terms of speech disorders, since the incidence of speech sound disorders is significantly high, and the diagnosis is often not adequate or not provided early on, which may not only impair speech, but also learning, social interactions, among others 26,27 . The findings of this study suggest that the degree of perception of intelligibility between (non-professional) men and women who do not have daily contact with children, let alone children with speech sound disorder, is similar, but women in this group agreed more, since they have sharper perceptual-auditory skills, and, thus, would be able to analyze speech in a more detailed and accurate manner 28 .…”

Polysyllable productions in preschool children with speech sound disorders: Error categories and the Framework of Polysyllable Maturity

“…Single word picture-naming tasks are commonly used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to assess children's speech (McLeod & Baker, 2014). An important component of any sampling task is the capacity to measure a range of possible phonological errors across a sample of word positions, in a relatively short period of time (Eisenberg & Hitchcock, 2010;Kirk & Vigeland, 2015).…”