Effectiveness of Intense Accent Modification Training With Refugees From Burma

This pilot research project sought to determine if an intensive accent modification training program that included See the Sound-Visual Phonics and prosodic gestures improved articulation, prosody, and intelligibility measures in refugees from Burma.

Four individuals (two men, two women) aged 20-67 participated in this study, and they were recruited from a state organization supporting refugees who have resettled in the United States.

All participants completed the Proficiency in Oral English Communication (POEC) and Assessment of Intelligibility of Dysarthric Speech (AIDS) to measure pre- and posttraining changes. The duration of this study was 6 weeks and consisted of 1 week of pretesting, 4 weeks of accent modification training, and 1 week of posttesting. Participants attended a total of twelve 50-min accent modification training sessions, including eight individual sessions (twice per week) and four group sessions (once per week), which provided a functional way to practice newly acquired skills in a scripted conversational-type format. Trained and untrained articulation and prosody probes were used to establish baselines and measure change.

All four participants showed gains across articulation and prosody (in untrained and trained items). On pre- and posttest measures, three of the four participants also made gains on the broad measures of the AIDS and the POEC.

Findings support that a brief and intensive multimodality accent modification program can be beneficial.