Critique Cerebral Palsy Research

Critique Cerebral Palsy Research

Pennington, Smallman, and Farrier (2006) aimed to examine the effectiveness of speech-language therapy on intelligibility of children with cerebral palsy (CP). Six students, aged 10 to 18 with mild dysarthria arising from cerebral palsy, were recruited from a special school serving children with motor impairments. Single word speech intelligibility was measured using the Children’s Intelligibility Measure and their connected speech was measured from a retell of Bus Story.
The intervention program was based on a systems approach, delivered by trained speech-language pathology students. The systems approach targets respiration, phonation, resonance, articulation and prosody. Each session started with emphasized breathing, its importance for speech and practicing breath control. Therapy for breath control focused on speaking at the beginning of exhalation. The importance of seating and posture were also discussed. Five activities focused regulating intensity and marking stress appropriately in regular phrases and four activities practiced breath control for conversational speech. The children were recorded prior to treatment, post treatment as well as a seven week follow-up. The speech was then rated for intelligibility by 36 naïve listeners, by having them transcribe what they heard. Results indicated that some gains were made in intelligibility at the single word level but not in connected speech, which later reverted to the pre-treatment level at the seven week follow up.
The amount of research available on the effectiveness of motor speech therapy for individuals with CP is limited. Efficacy of common treatment approaches has not been fully documented. This study undertook the task of discovering whether the widespread practice of these techniques commonly used in therapy yields any results. This is an overall strength of Pennington et al. (2006) because it provides a springboard for other studies of this nature to be based upon and improved....

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