Estimates of the prevalence of speech and motor speech disorders in persons with complex neurodevelopmental disorders.
Lawrence D Shriberg, Edythe A Strand, Kathy J Jakielski and 1 others
PMID 31221012WHAT IT FOUND
Among 346 speakers with eight complex neurodevelopmental disorders, 62.7% had a speech and/or motor speech disorder.
Motor speech problems, including speech motor delay, dysarthria and apraxia, were common in some groups, but groups varied widely.
Key findings
0162.7% (217/346) of participants across the eight complex neurodevelopmental disorder groups had a speech and/or motor speech disorder at assessment.
02Speech motor delay was present in 25.1% of participants, dysarthria alone in 13.3%, apraxia alone in 4.3%, and concurrent dysarthria and apraxia in 4.9%.
0372.4% (92/127) of participants classified with speech delay or persistent speech delay also had a motor speech disorder.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Participants were convenience samples recruited over decades, so the estimates may not represent all people with each complex neurodevelopmental disorder. 4.4% of original participants could not be classified because speech samples lacked enough pause opportunities or had an indeterminate pause marker score. Generalization is limited to people able to complete conversational speech tasks and the eight disorders in the database. The speech motor delay, dysarthria, and apraxia measures were newly available and need cross-validation by other research groups. Small cell sizes made many dysarthria subtype estimates preliminary, especially outside Down syndrome.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The article is marked as supported by NIH extramural research funding.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these figures as population rates for every person with a complex neurodevelopmental disorder. The participants were convenience samples, not a random population, and the study did not test whether treatment based on these classifications improves speech.