Effect of Strengthening the Mouth Muscles Training on Phonetic Intelligibility of Children with Functional Articulation Disorders / 听力学及言语疾病杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore the effects of the mouth -muscle strengthening training on the phonetic in-telligibility (PI) of children with functional articulation disorders (FAD) .Methods A total of 80 children of 4 to 7 years old with FAD were randomly divided into the common group (n=40) and comprehensive group (n=40) .Both groups accepted routine speech training ,and the comprehensive group was given mouth muscles training additional-ly .All the children received the assessment of speech before the speech training and 3 months after the training .Re-sults Before the speech training ,the PIs of the common and comprehensive groups were 34 .54％ and 33 .52％ ,re-spectively .The differences between the 2 groups were not statistically significant (P> 0 .05) .After 3 months of speech training ,the PI in the common group increased to 77 .02 ± 4 .21％ from 34 .54 ± 7 .28％ of the baseline ,while in the comprehensive group ,the PI increased to 87 .54 ± 4 .31％ from 33 .52 ± 7 .46％ .In both groups ,the PIs after training were significantly higher than those of before the training respectively .The differences were statistically significant (P<0 .05) .The PIs in the comprehensive group were significantly higher than those of in the common group .The differences were statistically significant (t= -8 .862 ,P<0 .001) .Conclusion Strengthening the mouth muscles is beneficial to improve the PI of children with FAD .