Dr. Jenya Iuzzini-Seigel, assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology in Marquette University’s College of Health Sciences, has been awarded a $1,156,000 grant from the Once Upon a Time Foundation for a randomized control trial that compares different treatment delivery schedules for children with childhood apraxia of speech.
CAS is a neurological speech disorder in which a child has difficulty planning and programming speech movements. This often results in highly unintelligible speech, even though the child knows what they want to say. Children with CAS will often require years of intense targeted treatment to improve the clarity and naturalness of their speech.
“There are few motor-based treatments for childhood apraxia of speech and there is a strong need for research that demonstrates their efficacy in large samples of children when different treatment parameters are varied,” Iuzzini-Seigel said. “There is a lack of sufficient evidence to guide decision-making regarding treatment distribution. While it seems intuitive to predict that more frequent treatment would result in greater treatment gains than less frequent treatment, even at the same total dosage, empirical research is needed. This study will compare treatment outcomes when DTTC — or Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing — is provided twice a week for 12 weeks versus four times per week for six weeks.”
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