LSVT LOUD

LSVT LOUD (Lee Silverman Voice Treatment) is a treatment approach that was originally developed for people with Parkinson’s disease to raise their voice and be heard more clearly. Cynthia Fox and Carol Boliek took this intensive voice treatment approach as a starting point to work on the breathing and phonation patterns in children with CP. Improving breathing for speech is important as is lays the foundation to work on other speech subsystems such as articulation.

Four children with dysarthria due to spastic CP were recruited for the therapy study. The children had 16 therapy sessions overall (4 sessions a week for 4 consecutive days), and were given exercises to practice at home. Improvement in vocal functioning was measured using a combination of perceptual evaluation and acoustic measures. Seven speech and language therapists were asked to listen to speech samples recorded prior to therapy, directly after therapy and six weeks after the end of the treatment, and to judge which one they preferred.

Results were somewhat mixed. Although the therapists judged that the speech of the children - for features such as loudness and voice quality - improved directly after the intensive treatment, the improvement could not be maintained. In addition, acoustic measures taken prior to and after therapy did not suggest significant improvement in the children’s voices.
 

At the same time though, parents reported that after the treatment their children spoke with less effort and their voices sounded less strangled. This raises the question whether the perceptual and acoustic measures employed in this study were simply not suited to capture the actual improvements in the children’s voices. This observation leaves us with two questions: 1.) How can we best measure decreased effort? And 2.) What exactly is the basis of listener perception?

 

Any ideas?

Fox, C. M. & Boliek, C. A. (2012). Intensive Voice Treatment (LSVT LOUD) for Children with Spastic Cerebral Palsy and dysarthria. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 55, 930-945.