Early speech and language intervention in Brazilian-Portuguese toddlers with cleft lip and/or palate.
Nancy J Scherer, Renata Yamashita, Debora Natalia de Oliveira and 4 others
PMID 33899624WHAT IT FOUND
Toddlers with cleft palate who received a combined speech and language intervention showed significant gains in vocabulary and sentence complexity immediately after treatment.
Speech accuracy and intelligibility improved significantly three months later, while the comparison group showed no such gains.
Key findings
01The intervention group showed significant immediate gains in language measures, including receptive language, expressive vocabulary, and sentence complexity, compared to the business-as-usual group.
02Speech accuracy and caregiver-reported intelligibility showed significant improvements in the intervention group at the three-month follow-up, but not immediately post-intervention.
03Compensatory and nasal speech errors did not differ significantly between groups, but monitoring these errors helped identify children requiring referral for velopharyngeal dysfunction assessment.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was a pilot with a small sample size (24 children at baseline, 19 analyzed at follow-up), limiting the generalizability of the results. Several assessments used in the study lacked validation in Brazilian Portuguese, which may affect the reliability of the outcome measures. The lack of significant effects on compensatory and nasal substitutions may be due to the small number of children exhibiting these errors at baseline. Dialectal variations in Brazilian Portuguese speech sounds were not fully accounted for in the transcription and analysis protocols.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of immediate speech changes as treatment failure. The study found that speech accuracy and intelligibility improved significantly at the three-month follow-up, suggesting that speech gains may lag behind language gains in this intervention model.