Speech treatment in nemaline myopathy: A single-subject experimental study

Abstract Purpose The objective of this work was to verify the efficacy of a treatment based on myofunctional therapy techniques which aimed to improve the tongue strength, precision, and speed of a ten-year-old girl with nemaline myopathy (NM) and the repercussions of this therapy on her speech intelligibility. NM is a rare congenital muscle disorder that causes extreme muscle weakness, especially in the face and neck, as well as severe dysarthria and dysphagia, although this does not affect the nervous system or cognitive development. Method This was a single-subject experimental study which used an interrupted pre- and post-treatment time-series design, and which applied autoregressive in…