Jacqueline Mckechnie

University of Canberra · Discipline of Speech Pathology Faculty of Health

Families are children’s first and most important teachers. However, their ability to support children’s learning and development at home varies due to knowledge, skills, and confidence. Family interventions aimed at increasing parents’ skills are labour-intensive and expensive. In contrast, text messages are low-cost and scalable. Text messages can...

Introduction Early childhood experiences have a lifelong impact on a child’s future. Social and environmental experiences and interactions have a profound relational effect on children’s physical and mental health which transfers agency to parents, caregivers and duty-bearers to care for the child’s welfare. In the Australian context early child de...

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) commonly affects the production of lexical stress contrast in polysyllabic words. Automated classification tools have the potential to increase reliability and efficiency in measuring lexical stress. Here, factors affecting the accuracy of a custom-built deep neural network (DNN)-based classification tool are evalu...

Digital games can make speech therapy exercises more enjoyable for children and increase their motivation during therapy. However, many such games developed to date have not been designed for long-term use. To address this issue, we developed Apraxia World, a speech therapy game specifically intended to be played over extended periods. In this stud...

Purpose One of the key principles of motor learning supports using knowledge of results feedback (KR, i.e., whether a response was correct / incorrect only) during high intensity motor practice, rather than knowledge of performance (KP, i.e., whether and how a response was correct/incorrect). In the future, mobile technology equipped with automatic...

There is continuing debate about the origins of productive morphological errors in children with speech sound disorders. This is the case for children with theorised phonetic and motor disorders, such as children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS, e.g., Ekelman & Aram, 1983; McNeill & Gillon, 2013 McNeill, B. C., & Gillon, G. T. (2013). Express...

Purpose: A systematic search and review of published studies was conducted on the use of automated speech analysis (ASA) tools for analysing and modifying speech of typically-developing children learning a foreign language and children with speech sound disorders to determine (i) types, attributes, and purposes of ASA tools being used; (ii) accura...

We present a multitier system for the remote administration of speech therapy to children with apraxia of speech. The system uses a client-server architecture model and facilitates task-oriented remote therapeutic training in both in-home and clinical settings. The system allows a speech language pathologist (SLP) to remotely assign speech producti...

Children with developmental disabilities such as childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) require repeated intervention sessions with a speech therapist, sometimes extending over several years. Technology-based therapy tools offer the potential to reduce the demanding workload of speech therapists as well as time and cost for families. In response to this...

This paper introduces a pronunciation verification method to be used in an automatic assessment therapy tool of child disordered speech. The proposed method creates a phonebased search lattice that is flexible enough to cover all probable mispronunciations. This allows us to verify the correctness of the pronunciation and detect the incorrect phone...

We present a multi-tier system for the remote administration of speech therapy to children with apraxia of speech. The system uses a client-server architecture model and facilitates task-oriented remote therapeutic training in both in-home and clinical settings. Namely, the system allows a speech therapist to remotely assign speech production exerc...