Recruiting
Phase 1
Phase 2

Speech Motor Chaining

Sponsor:

Syracuse University

Code:

NCT05929859

Conditions

Speech Sound Disorder

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 9 - 17

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Interventions

Speech Motor Chaining

Study Details

Brief summary:

The goal of this randomized-controlled trial is to compare distributed treatment schedules and intensive treatment schedules in 84 school-age children with residual speech sound disorders. The main question it aims to answer is:

  • How does intensive and distributed treatment affect speech sound learning in residual speech sound disorder?

Some participants will be treated with a traditional Distributed schedule of 2 sessions per weeks for 8 weeks (16 hours total), whereas others will be treated with an Intensive schedule and will complete 16 hours of treatment in 4 weeks.

Conditions

Speech Sound Disorder

Study ID

NCT05929859

Start date

Oct 26, 2023

Status verified date

Jan, 2026

Completion date

Feb 29, 2028

Anticipated

Primary completion date

Feb 29, 2028

Anticipated

Eligibility Criteria

Eligibility Criteria

Sex: All

Age: 9 - 17

Healthy Volunteers: Not accepted

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Must speak American English as a dominant language.
  • Must have began learning English by at least the age of 3 years.
  • Must be between 9;0 to 17;11 years of age.
  • Must have reported difficulty with /ɹ/ and/or /s/ production
  • Must pass pure tone hearing screening at 25 dB at 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz.
  • Must receive a scaled score of at least 5 on the Listening Comprehension and Story Retelling subtests of the Test of Integrated Language and Literacy Skills (TILLS)
  • Must receive a percentile score of 5 or below on the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-3 (GFTA-3) Sounds in Words subtest.
  • Must have 1 scorable response with 5+ consecutive correct /pataka/ with > 3.4 syllables per second in the MRR-Tri task of the Maximum Performance Tasks OR must demonstrate no childhood apraxia of speech (CAS-only) features in BOTH articulatory and rate/prosody domains of the ProCAD.
  • Must score <40% accurate on /ɹ/ and/or /s/ probes assessing these sounds at the word level.
  • Must express a desire to modify their speech.

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Must have no known history of autism spectrum disorder, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability, permanent hearing loss, or brain injury.
  • Must not have current cleft palate or voice disorder.

Study Design

Enrollment

84 participants

Anticipated

Allocation

Randomized

Intervention Model

Parallel Assignment

Primary purpose

Treatment

Interventions and Outcome Measures

Arms

experimental: Intensive Treatment

Speech Motor Chaining will be delivered in an intensive fashion. Week 1: 8 sessions (2 sessions per day on 4 different days) Week 2: 3 sessions (1 per day on 3 different days) Week 3: 3 sessions (1 per day on 3 different days) Week 4: 2 sessions (1 per day on 2 different days)

experimental: Distributed Treatment

Speech Motor Chaining will be delivered twice weekly for 8 weeks

Interventions

Speech Motor Chaining

Sessions begin with Pre-practice to elicit target sounds, with verbal cueing and shaping strategies. During Structured Practice, items are practice in blocks of 6 consecutive trials (with systematic increases in difficulty), and our web-based software will manipulate the principles of motor learning, including the stimulus prompt, the participant's production, analysis of the clinician's rating, feedback prompts for the clinician, and the variability present in the practice trial. Randomized Practice will also be guided by the software and includes all linguistic levels that were produced correctly during Structured Practice, with items presented in random order.

Primary outcome measure

  • Change in percent correct for treated sound, rated by blinded listeners. [ Time Frame: Before the initiation of treatment and again 10 weeks later. ]

Central Contacts and Locations

Central contacts

Jonathan Preston, PhD

315-443-1351jopresto@syr.edu

Nina Benway, PhD

nrbenway@syr.edu

Locations

Syracuse University

Recruiting

Syracuse, New York, United States, 13244

Contacts

Jonathan Preston, PhD

315-443-3143jopresto@syr.edu

Nicole Caballero, MS

315-443-1185nfcaball@syr.edu

More Information

Sponsor

Syracuse University

Last update posted

Jan 13, 2026

Last verified

Jan, 2026

Trial information was received from ClinicalTrials.gov and was last updated on 2026-09-10. This information was provided to ClinicalTrials.gov by Syracuse University on 2026-01-13.