BACKGROUND: A comparative study of treatment modalities for improving articulation in a 13-year-old child with severe spastic dysarthria associated with spastic cerebral palsy (SCP) was conducted. METHOD: A multiple treatment design examined the effect of phonetic placement therapy (PPT) and sEMG-facilitated biofeedback relaxation therapy over a 6-week period. Treatment outcomes were measured using acoustic and perceptual analysis. RESULTS: Results revealed significant improvement in single word intelligibility following PPT with the improvements maintained following sEMG treatment. sEMG-facilitated biofeedback relaxation treatment indicated the occurrence of a pre-cursor skill in increased motor control. Intelligibility at paragraph or sentence level did not change following either treatment. Perceptually, there was no change to any parameters of articulation following either treatment. However, subtle changes were observed on acoustic analysis. Functionally, the participant reported no changes to feelings of well-being or distress regarding her speech disorder over the period of intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Clinically, the PPT and sEMG treatments demonstrated improvement in single word articulation, despite no perceptible changes to overall intelligibility. It is likely that the severity of the participant's dysarthria was a factor in the minimal changes observed following treatment. Future studies examining the treatments in children with mild and/or moderate dysarthria are required.
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Marchant et al. (2008) studied this question.