Telepractice in pediatric speech-language therapy: Prosodic and lexical characteristics of patient, provider and caregiver speech

Abstract

Telepractice is an example of a barrier in the communication channel between the speaker and the listener who use a digital device. The study examined the effect of telepractice on the prosodic and lexical characteristics of the provider, caregiver, and child speech during clinician-directed auditory rehabilitation. One provider and seven caregiver-child dyads with deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children participated in one 30-minute in-person and one sequential tele-intervention session. Mean pitch, pitch range, utterance duration, speech rate, and mean length of utterance (MLU) were measured in 30 utterances produced by each participant per session. The provider and DHH children increased their pitch range when addressing each other in the tele- compared to the in-person session. The provider increased mean pitch when addressing the child in the tele- compared to the in-person session. Mothers produced higher speech rate, longer utterance duration, and higher MLU when addressing their children in the in-person than tele- session. The results suggest that the provider and the children modify prosodic characteristics of their speech as a result of the transmission degradation of speech signal due to telepractice. The effect of technoference, interruptions to the social interaction between speakers, on lexical characteristics of the caregiver speech was identified.