Clinicians and practitioners should look to already established interventions for improving how students with developmental language disorders utilize organizational strategies and other well-researched methods for improving their cognitive and academic functioning in functional contexts.
Purpose
Persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may demonstrate abnormal prosodic patterns in conversational speech, which can negatively affect social interactions. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify interventions measuring the improvement of expressive speech prosody in persons with ASD in order to support clinician's evidence-based decision making.
Method
We used 13 electronic databases to search for relevant articles using terms related to autism, intervention, and speech prosody. The databases identified a total of nine articles for the title, abstract, and full-text reviews. Five more articles were included after performing descendant and reference searches. One peer-reviewed article was excluded due to insufficient data received from the authors. We coded the resulting 13 articles for report, setting, intervention, outcome, and results characteristics and methodological quality.
Results
Results showed that interventions specifically targeting speech prosody using established and emerging evidence-based practices across more than 1 treatment day resulted in moderate to large improvements in speech prosody in persons with ASD. Interventions that indirectly targeted prosody or were very short resulted in small or nonsignificant effects.
Discussion
The results of this literature review suggest that interventions that directly target speech prosody using established evidence-based practices for ASD may be most effective for increasing typical prosodic patterns during speech for persons with ASD. Further research is needed to establish which interventions are most effective for each age range and context.
Supplemental Material
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12735926
Narration has been shown to be a foundational skill for literacy development in school-age children. Elementary teachers routinely conduct classroom lessons that focus on reading decoding and comprehension, but they rarely provide instruction in oral narration (Hall et al., 2021). This multisite randomized controlled trial was designed to rigorously evaluate the efficacy of the Supporting Knowledge of Language and Literacy (SKILL) intervention program for improving oral narrative comprehension and production. Three hundred fifty-seven students who were at-risk for language and literacy difficulties in Grades 1–4 in 13 schools across seven school districts were randomly assigned to the SKILL treatment condition or a business as usual (BAU) control condition. SKILL was provided to small groups of two to four students in 36 thirty-minute lessons across a 3-month period. Multilevel modeling with students nested within teachers and teachers nested within schools revealed students who received the SKILL treatment significantly outperformed students in the BAU condition on measures of oral narrative comprehension and production immediately after treatment. Oral narrative production for the SKILL treatment group remained significantly more advanced at follow-up testing conducted 5 months after intervention ended. Improvements in oral narration generalized to a measure of written narration at posttest and the treatment advantage was maintained at follow-up. Grade level did not moderate effects for oral narration, but it did for reading comprehension, with a higher impact for students in grades 3 and 4.
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