Comparison of Two Treatment Conditions for Young Children with Speech Sound Disorders

The purpose of this study was to compare treatment outcomes between stimulus presentation conditions to children with moderate to severe SSD: a traditional paper presentation versus a computer software generated presentation. The participants were four monolingual kindergarten children with moderate to severe SSD. A multiple baseline across behaviors single subject design was employed in the study. Two non-stimulable, non-cognate sounds from two different manner categories were selected as sound targets. One sound error was treated using paper stimuli presented in a traditional paper table-top presentation (TAB condition) while the other sound error was treated using stimuli presented on the computer (CBI condition). Picture stimuli for both conditions were generated by the SCIP (Sound Contrasts in Phonology) software program. Treatment followed the paradigm described by Williams (2003). The number of treatment sessions, final treatment performance, and highest generalization performance are summarized for both treatment conditions in Table 1. Although conditions were counterbalanced, data are arranged by condition for ease of interpretation