Neural Indices of Intervention Outcomes in Children With Speech Sound Disorders

Speech production treatment will be delivered in two phases: Imitation and Spontaneous Production. Treatment will be provided two times weekly in 1-hour sessions, for up to 19 sessions. Every child's intervention program will target a single phoneme that was excluded from his or her phonemic inventory. Each treatment phoneme will be targeted through the production of five words that will be initially introduced to the child using a storybook reading format. Imitation treatment will continue until a child maintains 75% accurate production of the treated phoneme over two consecutive sessions (i.e. performance-based criterion) or until seven consecutive sessions are completed (i.e. time-based criterion). Spontaneous Production will continue until the child maintains either a performance-based criterion of 90% accurate production of the treated phoneme over 3 consecutive sessions, or a time-based criterion of 12 consecutive sessions.

This speech treatment condition will be administered in the same way as the Speech Production treatment. The difference in conditions will be that speech treatment in this condition will last for 50 minutes rather than 60 minutes. The remaining 10 minutes of each session will involve the speech perception training. These speech perception tasks will involve previously recorded word-level productions focusing on the same phoneme that is addressed in speech production treatment in word-initial position. A variety of words produced correctly and incorrectly by adults and children will be presented in pairs and the children will have to determine if the words contain the same word-initial phoneme or two different phonemes.