The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of syllable formation intervention program with visual cues on the syllable-level phonological awareness ability of children with intellectual disabilities. The subjects include three children w...
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of syllable formation intervention program with visual cues on the syllable-level phonological awareness ability of children with intellectual disabilities. The subjects include three children with mild intellectual disabilities along with articulation and phonological disorders who showed the language development level of 4- or 5-year-olds. For intervention effects, the study reviewed changes to their performance of phonological awareness based on the multiple probe design. In addition, it compared changes to the percentage of consonants correct(PCC) and phonological processes before and after the intervention in order to examine any changes to the speech sound production abilities of the subject children according to the improvement of their syllable-level phonological awareness capacity. The specific findings were as follows:
First, the subjects recorded approximately 2.6% of syllable-level phonological awareness performance at the base line, started to improve gradually with the intervention, recorded approximately 83.3% right after the intervention, and maintained approximately 88.9% after the intervention.
Secondly, the subject children's overall PCC was about 65.1% before the intervention and rose to about 76.0% after the intervention, making about 10.9% improvement. Their changes were relatively big in syllable-final rather than word-initial, syllable-initial(WISI) and word-medial, syllable-initial(WMSI). Their PCC at syllable-final improved by approximately 42.8% from before the intervention.
Finally, as for phonological processes, their syllable-final omission process decreased by about 31.6% in the syllable structure, making the biggest change. Nasal sound omission decreased by about 25.8% in the manner of articulation, and vela sound omission decreased by about 25.5% in the place of articulation. Other changes took place in the range of approximately 0.0%~10.0%, which represent relatively small changes.
Those findings led to conclusions that syllable formation intervention program with visual cues made an effective intervention method to improve the syllable-level phonological awareness of children with intellectual disabilities and that the syllable-level phonological awareness abilities had impacts on the reduction of syllable-final omission of the characteristics of their speech sound disorders.