Motor Speech Interventions improve speech in children with cerebral palsy

What is it about?

This systematic review outlined what we know about speech interventions for children with cerebral palsy (CP). It also evaluated the effectiveness of these interventions in improving speech intelligibility and communicative participation, which is the ability to take part in daily conversations. The review included 21 articles which reported nine different motor speech interventions. While the research quality was variable all the interventions reported improvements in speech intelligibility, articulation, or speech accuracy at sound, word, or sentence levels. While there have been advances in the area of motor speech interventions for children with CP, such as the publication of some new interventions, more rigorous research is required.

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Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Photo by Charlein Gracia on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Dysarthria is common in children with CP and impacts both speech intelligibility and communicative participation. Motor speech interventions and principles of motor learning (PML) are considered critical in improving dysarthric speech but it is unclear how PML are used in motor speech interventions for children with CP. This review consolidated the similarities and differences in the use of PML in the included motor speech interventions for children with CP. Motor speech interventions target different components of speech but generally do not result in improvements in communicative participation. This review summarized the intervention aims, focus, and outcome measures used in the motor speech interventions. It also provided the intervention effect sizes in speech and communicative participation outcomes.

Perspectives