Influence of Emotional State and Age on Speech Response of Children with Speech Impairment During Speech Therapy Session

Abstract

There are many research works conducted to find out procedures to increase vocalization in clients with speech impairment, however there is no research work that seeks to explore the influence of emotional state and age on speech response of children with speech impairment with characteristic difficulty in vocal imitation. It has been hypothesis that emotional state and age will independently have significant main effect on speech response of children with speech impairment during speech therapy session. Also that, the two independent variables will have interactive effect on the speech response of the same participants. Repeated measure experimental design was conducted using 30 participants (m=20, f=10; 2-5 year & 6-9 years) under active and deactivated emotional state at different times. Result shows that hypothesis 1was significant (Wilk’s˄=5.940, F(1,28)=11.800, p˂.05, eta sq=.601). Hypothesis 2 was also confirmed to be significant (F(1,28)=4.209, p˂.05, eta sq=.131). Moreover, there was significant interactional effect of the two independent variables (Wilk’s˄=4.897,  F(1,28)=13.200, p˂.05, eta sq=413). The implication is that the influence of emotional state and age should be considered in daily clinical practice of speech therapy when conducting clinical assessment and speech therapy session to improve speech response.