Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) form a heterogeneous group, with respect to severity, etiology, proximal causes, speech error characteristics, and response to treatment. Infants develop speech and language in interaction with neurological maturation and general perceptual, motoric, and cognitive skills in a social-emotional…

Children with Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) often present motor co-ordination difficulties accompanying their speech and sound delays. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a paired versus a small group gross motor intervention on selected pre-school children, pre-identified with CAS. Children pre-identified with…

Background: 'Speech sound disorder' is an umbrella term that encompasses dysarthria, articulation disorders, childhood apraxia of speech and phonological disorders. However, differential diagnosis between these disorders is a persistent challenge in speech pathology, as many diagnostic procedures use symptom clusters instead of identifying an…

Purpose: Unexpected and sustained manipulations of auditory feedback during speech production result in "reflexive" and "adaptive" responses, which can shed light on feedback and feedforward auditory-motor control processes, respectively. Persons with Parkinson's disease (PwPD) have shown aberrant reflexive and adaptive…

Purpose: Reduced stress commonly occurs in talkers with Parkinson's disease (PD), whereas excessive and equal stress is frequently associated with dysarthria of talkers with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and multiple sclerosis (MS). This study sought to identify articulatory impairment patterns that underlie these two impaired stress…

Purpose: Laryngeal high-speed videoendoscopy (LHSV) has been recognized as a highly valuable modality for the scientific investigations of vocal fold (VF) vibrations. In contrast to stroboscopic imaging, LHSV enables visualizing aperiodic VF vibrations. However, the technique is less well established in the clinical care of disordered voices,…

Purpose: This study sought to determine if (a) children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), other speech sound disorders (SSDs), and typical development (TD) would perform differently on a standardized motor assessment and (b) whether comorbid language impairment would impact group differences. Method: Speech, language, and motor abilities…

Common descriptions of articulatory requirements for production of the alveolar trill /r/ mainly focus on describing the configuration of the anterior portions of the tongue, while in contrast, the more posterior parts receive limited attention. Understanding how the posterior portions of the tongue move is vital for understanding speech motor…

Background: Individuals with developmental dysarthria typically demonstrate reduced functioning of one or more of the speech subsystems, which negatively impacts speech intelligibility and communication within social contexts. A few treatment approaches are available for improving speech production and intelligibility among individuals with…

Background: Treatment outcome data for children with severe speech sound disorders with motor speech involvement (SSD-MSI) are derived from Phase I clinical research studies. These studies have demonstrated positive improvements in speech production. Currently there is no research examining the optimal treatment dose frequency for this population.…

Purpose: While there has been mounting research centered on the diagnosis of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), little has focused on differentiating CAS from pediatric dysarthria. Because CAS and dysarthria share overlapping speech symptoms and some children have both motor speech disorders, differential diagnosis can be challenging. There is a…

Purpose: This study has two key aims--first, to provide developmental articulatory norms for the alveolar-velar distinction in 30 English-speaking typically developing (TD) children; second, to illustrate the utility of the reported measures for classifying and quantifying the speech of children with a history of persistent velar fronting as they…

Purpose: Motor neuron diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), have a devastating effect on speech muscle function that often results in severe communication deficits. Over the course of bulbar disease, tongue and jaw movements are modified, but their impact on speech is poorly understood. The aim of this study was to determine the…

Purpose: While the involvement of attention in utterance planning is well established at the conceptual and lexical levels, the attentional demands of postlexical processes are still debated. This study investigates the involvement of attentional resources on motor speech encoding during utterance production in the context of Parkinson's disease…

Purpose: Generalizations can be made about the order in which speech sounds are added to a child's phonemic inventory and the ways that child speech deviates from adult targets in a given language. Developmental and disordered speech patterns are presumed to reflect differences in both phonological knowledge and skilled motor control, but the…