Effectiveness of the Pre-Verbal Stage Speech Readiness Program in Expressive Language Development of Children Aged Between 1-and-a-half to 3 Years with Down Syndrome

Abstract

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the pre-verbal stage speech readiness program in the expressive language development of children with Down syndrome. The samples were 18 children with Down syndrome aged 1-and-a-half to 3 years who received developmental stimulation at Rajanukul Institute, Bangkok, during March – June 2012. All samples had expressive language developmental score less than 30; and were neither deaf nor blind. With proportional stratified random sampling, 9 participle were selected to be in an experimental group who received the pre-verbal stage of speech readiness program (validity: 0.80-1.00) for 30 days (60 times) in addition to the normal program; whereas the other 9 were assigned to be the control group who received only normal program. The program was comprised of 8 activities: - lip exercise, tongue exercise, jaw exercise, sound imitating (no meaning), sucking, blowing, biting-chewing-swallowing and word imitating (meaning). The data analysis instrument used was an expressive language developmental assessment tool with Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for reliability of 0.859. Data analysis was conducted using descriptive statistic, Fisher‘s exact test and t-test. It was found that, after the experiment the study group scored significantly higher on expressive language development (p<0.05) both by before-and-after comparison and comparing with the control group. Thus, the speech readiness program should be promoted to enhance the expressive language development of children with Down syndrome.