Auditory-Perceptual Training Via Telepractice

September 3, 2025 updated by: Elaine Hitchcock, Montclair State University

Online Assessment and Enhancement of Auditory Perception for Speech Sound Errors: Online Perceptual Training for RSE

The objective of this study is to measure the effects of online perceptual training on perception and production in children with RSE who exhibit atypical perception relative to norms from our lab-based pilot data. In a multiple-baseline across-subjects design, 10 children with RSE will begin in a baseline phase probing perceptual acuity for /r/. Perceptual training with multiple types of stimuli will be initiated in a staggered fashion. Production probes elicited before and after treatment will assess the extent to which perception gains transfer to /r/ production.

Study Overview

Status

Completed

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Detailed Description

Following the initial evaluation to determine eligibility, participants will be enrolled in a baseline phase in which perception and production abilities will be probed but not treated. In a multiple-baseline across-subjects design with randomization, the 10 participants will be randomly assigned to transition from the baseline to the treatment condition at one of 7 possible points, ranging from 3 to 9 baseline sessions. After baseline sessions, perceptual training will be delivered in twelve 30-minute sessions occurring 3 times per week for 4 weeks. The training is fully computerized and can be self-administered, but a study clinician will attend one session per participant per week to ensure attention to study tasks. Each session will feature three listening tasks of approximately equal duration. Following perceptual training, participants will receive 4 60-minute sessions of production training completed over two weeks.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

10

Phase

  • Not Applicable

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

  • United States
    • New Jersey
      • Upper Montclair, New Jersey, United States, 07043
        • Montclair State University- Online Research Study

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

9 years to 15 years (Child)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Must be between 9;0 and 15;11 years of age at the time of enrollment.
  • Must speak English as the dominant language (i.e., must have begun learning English by age 2, per parent report).
  • Must speak a rhotic dialect of English.
  • Must pass a pure-tone hearing screening at 20dB HL
  • Must pass a brief examination of oral structure and function.
  • Must exhibit less than 30% accuracy, based on consensus across 2 trained listeners, on a probe list eliciting rhotics in various phonetic contexts at the word level.
  • Must exhibit no more than 3 sounds other than /r/ in error on the GFTA-3

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Must not receive a T score more than 1.3 SD below the mean on the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence-2 (WASI-2) Matrix Reasoning
  • Must not receive a scaled score of 7 or higher on the Recalling Sentences and Formulated Sentences subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-5 (CELF-5).
  • Must not have an existing diagnosis of developmental disability or major neurobehavioral syndrome such as cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, or Autism Spectrum Disorder

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Primary Purpose: Treatment
  • Allocation: N/A
  • Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Online Speech Training

Participants will be randomly assigned to transition from the baseline to the treatment condition at one of 7 possible points, ranging from 3 to 9 baseline sessions. All participants will receive 12 sessions of perceptual training over 4 weeks. Finally, participants will complete a 3-session maintenance phase in which perception and production are probed but not treated. Perception will be measured using the identification and category goodness judgment.

Following completion of perception training all participants will complete two weeks of production training. The production training will consists of 4, 60-minute sessions. Each session will provide instruction and practice trials.
Behavioral: Perceptual training

Perceptual training involves self-paced presentation of auditory stimuli via a computerized software program.

Stimuli are organized into three separate tasks:

Tasks 1 and 3 will train category goodness judgment: Participants will hear 75 naturally produced speech tokens containing /r/ from various speakers, with a balance of correct and incorrect productions. They will classify each /r/ as correct or incorrect and receive feedback on the accuracy of their classification. Tasks 1 and 3 differ in that task 1 will feature a subset of items designed to provide focused practice on a specific context (e.g., initial /r/ as in red; /r/ as syllable nucleus as in sir), with increasing difficulty over time, whereas task 3 will feature randomly selected items representing all contexts and difficulty levels.

Task 2: Participants will hear 75 items drawn from the synthetic rake-wake continuum used in the identification task administered at baseline.

Behavioral: Production training

Instruction: Discuss tongue shapes for /r/. Pre-practice: relatively unstructured, highly interactive elicitation; provide models and placement cue and KP on every trial.

Structured syllable practice: Practice will occur in blocks of 10 consecutive trials on the same syllable (e.g., 10 /ra/), after which a new syllable will be addressed (e.g., 10 /re/--but note that in the fully blocked condition, the same syllable should occur in two consecutive blocks of 10).

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Averaged Perception Percent Accuracy Score
Time Frame: Participants' perception progress was tracked across all treatment phases. The averaged percent accuracy score reported here was collected during maintenance sessions (3 sessions across 1 week).
Averaged percent accuracy post-perception training.
Participants' perception progress was tracked across all treatment phases. The averaged percent accuracy score reported here was collected during maintenance sessions (3 sessions across 1 week).

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Raw Change in Percent Accuracy Perception Task
Time Frame: Participants' progress was tracked across pre-treatment phase (averaged baselines) compared to post treatment phase (averaged three maintenance sessions which occurred over 1 week), up to 8 weeks, including baselines, treatment, and maintenance sessions.
Represents the raw change in percent accuracy on the perception task, calculated as the difference between the average pre-training accuracy score and the average post-training accuracy score.
Participants' progress was tracked across pre-treatment phase (averaged baselines) compared to post treatment phase (averaged three maintenance sessions which occurred over 1 week), up to 8 weeks, including baselines, treatment, and maintenance sessions.
Perceptually Rated Accuracy of /r/ Word Production
Time Frame: Participants' progress was tracked across pre-treatment phase (averaged baselines) compared to post treatment phase (averaged three maintenance sessions which occurred over 1 week), up to 8 weeks, including baselines, treatment, and maintenance sessions.
Perceptually rated accuracy of /r/ word production probes across an average of four expert listeners post perception and production training.
Participants' progress was tracked across pre-treatment phase (averaged baselines) compared to post treatment phase (averaged three maintenance sessions which occurred over 1 week), up to 8 weeks, including baselines, treatment, and maintenance sessions.

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Sponsor

Montclair State University

Collaborators

New York University
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Syracuse University

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Elaine R. Hitchcock, PhD, Montclair State University

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

General Publications

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start (Actual)

January 21, 2022

Primary Completion (Actual)

June 30, 2024

Study Completion (Actual)

June 30, 2024

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

April 5, 2021

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

April 22, 2021

First Posted (Actual)

April 26, 2021

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Estimated)

September 5, 2025

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

September 3, 2025

Last Verified

September 1, 2025

More Information

Terms related to this study

Keywords

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • 20-21-2137-Study 3
  • R15DC019775-01 (U.S. NIH Grant/Contract)

Drug and device information, study documents

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated drug product

No

Studies a U.S. FDA-regulated device product

No

product manufactured in and exported from the U.S.

No

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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