Effects of rate and rhythm control treatment on consonant production accuracy in apraxia of speech

Abstract

A speaker with apraxia of speech and aphasia was trained to produce multisyllabic words using a combination of metronomic rate control and hand-tapping. A multiple baseline design was used to examine the effects of treatment on sound production. Treatment was applied to three syllable words with primary stress on the first syllable while generalization was measured to: (1) untrained exemplars; (2) three syllable words with different stress patterns; (3) four syllable words; and (4) s-blend words. Positive sound changes were noted for trained and untrained words. Treatment was extended to a second set of words to which generalization had been incomplete and additional improvement was observed.