Rhythmic Speech Cueing (RSC)

In rhythmic speech cueing (RSC), speech rate control via auditory rhythm is used to improve temporal characteristics such as fluency, articulatory rate, pause time, and intelligibility of speaking. Speech rate can be the primary therapeutic focus as in fluency disorders like stuttering, or the tempo of speech can take on a mediating role for articulatory precision and thus speech intelligibility. In RSC the patient speaks to an auditory stimulation. This is presented as a metronome pulsed signal, a rhythmic pattern (played live with an instrument or synthesizer), or in the form of a more complex musical piece. Tempo is the most important factor for the therapeutic power of the technique. It has to be set precisely according to available research data and the specific therapeutic goal. There are two modes of acoustically cueing speech production, namely metric and patterned cueing. In metric cueing a pulsed auditory stimulation is used (usually produced by a metronome). The patient is asked to match either one syllable or one full word to one beat. In patterned cueing the patient reproduces a pre-structured rhythmic sentence at a given tempo (e.g. as a rhyme or as in singing a song). In contrast to metric cueing, the syllables (and pauses) here are not of equal duration. There can be longer and shorter syllables, as in the song Oh When the Saints go Marching in.