Interarticulator coordination in children with and without cerebral palsy.
Ignatius S B Nip
PMID 25905558WHAT IT FOUND
Children with cerebral palsy moved their lips and jaw less smoothly together than typical peers, especially in timing.
Simple sentences gave the most coordination, not fast repeated buh.
Key findings
01Children with cerebral palsy showed reduced spatial coordination between the upper and lower lips compared with typically developing peers.
02Children with cerebral palsy had less consistent timing between the upper lip and jaw, and between the jaw and lower lip, than typical peers.
03For the jaw and lower lip, the simple sentence task showed more spatial coordination and less timing lag than the syllable repetition or fast repeated buh task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only twelve children with cerebral palsy and twelve typically developing peers, so the groups were small. The children with cerebral palsy varied widely in speech impairment, and the sample was too small to separate children with dysarthria from children without dysarthria. The study looked only at the lips and jaw, not the tongue, so it does not describe all parts of speech movement. The findings are group comparisons, not evidence that a treatment changes coordination or intelligibility. The intelligibility range in the typically developing group was larger than expected, and some younger peers scored lower because of voicing errors.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that reduced coordination causes dysarthria or that a therapy targeting lip and jaw coordination will improve intelligibility. The study compared small groups of children and did not test treatment.