Toward a speech rehabilitation model for linguistically and culturally minor groups: Foreign born immigrants

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Despite the increasing attention to the “culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD)” communities in research and clinical practice, monolingual speakers of minority languages living in the United States (US), such as foreign- born populations who speak a language other than English, have been nearly excluded from speech rehabilitation. This is mainly because of the assumption that the target language of intervention is English regardless of the cultural and linguist background of the patients. The goal of the proposed project, framed by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health ICF), is (1) to address missing personal and environmental factors of the foreign-born populations who are in need of speech rehabilitation and (2) to develop and conduct a small-scale clinical trial that incorporates these missing factors into a speech intervention program. For an initial effort, a total of 32 Korean-speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and their families will participate in the study. To overcome the primary obstacles of delivering speech therapy in Korean, such as the availability of Korean speech rehabilitation programs in US, we employ two recent rehabilitation delivery models: telepractice and group therapy. PD participants will receive speech therapy consisting of 16 sessions of 60 minutes duration delivered over four weeks using a telehealth platform. PD families will attend weekly, 1-hour, family training and support sessions, which will provide family counseling and conversation training. Primary (speech intelligibility, acoustic measures) and secondary (communication participation, health and well-being) outcome measures will be obtained from Pre-, Post-, and Follow-up timepoints. The primary deliverable will be the initial stage for an interdisciplinary speech intervention model for speakers with communication disorders who cannot receive speech therapy in English. Further, health literacy among linguistically and culturally diverse groups will be enhanced. The long-term goal is to expand the number and scope of populations with quality health care access and to develop speech intervention programs that incorporate sophisticated attention to personal and environmental factors specific to the target clinical populations.