ReST in Italian (Scarcella et al., 2021)

Background: The Rapid Syllable Transition (ReST) treatment is an effective intervention designed to address the planning and programming disorder found in childhood apraxia of speech. To date, no study has considered its use with children who speak languages other than English.

Aim: This pilot study aimed to examine the use of ReST treatment with Italian children. We hypothesized that the ReST approach would improve the overall accuracy of the targeted behaviors of lexical stress, smoothness, and phonemic accuracy, whereas phonemic and phonetic accuracy of untreated items would remain stable.

Method: Two monolingual Italian-speaking children with childhood apraxia of speech received therapy in 12 one-hour sessions, 2–3 times per week, using a single-case experimental design. The treatment procedures used in English were replicated in Italian with one change: In English, two stress patterns are treated. Italian commonly uses three stress patterns; therefore, the stimuli were modified accordingly. Accuracy of articulation, lexical stress, and smoothness were assessed at pretreatment and 1 day, 1 week, and 4 months posttreatment in treated and untreated pseudowords and in real words and sentences.

Results: Both children improved on treated pseudowords and real words with moderate effect sizes, but only one child generalized to untreated pseudowords. Maintenance of treatment results was observed in both participants. Articulation of control phonemes did not change.

Conclusions: ReST treatment in Italian is feasible, and a treatment effect was found, showing that its use may be valid in languages other than English. Further research is required.

Supplemental Material S1. Word list of 52 Italian polysyllabic words based on an Australian English word list.

Supplemental Material S2. Italian 28-word inconsistency task based on DEAP Inconsistency subtest.

Scarcella, I., Michelazzo, L., & McCabe, P. (2021). A pilot single-case experimental design study of Rapid Syllable Transition treatment for Italian children with childhood apraxia of speech. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_AJSLP-20-00133

Publisher Note: This article is part of the Special Issue: Select Papers From the 2020 Conference on Motor Speech.