Treatment Effects on Speech Intelligibility and Length of Utterance in Children with Specific Language and Intelligibility Impairments

This purpose of this randomized group experiment was (a) to test the post-treatment (i.e., immediately after treatment) and follow-up (i.e., 8 months after the end of treatment) efficacy of a treatment designed to facilitate both sentence length and speech intelligibility (i.e., broad target recast), and (b) to explore whether pretreatment speech accuracy predicted response to treatment in children with severe phonological and expressive language impairment. The results support the conclusion that broad target recast facilitated follow-up speech intelligibility in children whose speech accuracy was relatively low prior to treatment. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)