Speech-Language Pathologists' Ratings of Speech Accuracy in Children With Speech Sound Disorders.

PURPOSE: Forming accurate and consistent speech judgments can be challenging when working with children with speech sound disorders who produce a large number and varied types of error patterns. Rating scales offer a systematic approach to assessing the whole word rather than individual sounds. Thus, these scales can be an efficient way for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to monitor treatment progress. This study evaluated the interrater reliability of an existing 3-point rating scale using a large group of SLPs as raters. METHOD: Utilizing an online platform, 30 SLPs completed a brief training and then rated single words produced by children with typical speech patterns and children with speech sound disorders. Words were closely balanced across the three rating categories of the scale. The interrater reliability of the SLPs ratings to a consensus judgment was examined. RESULTS: The majority of SLPs (87%) reached substantial interrater reliability to a consensus judgment using the 3-point rating scale. Correct productions had the highest interrater reliability. Productions with extensive errors had higher agreement than those with minor errors. Certain error types, such as vowel distortions, were especially challenging for SLPs to judge. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated substantial interrater reliability to a consensus judgment among a large majority of 30 SLPs using a 3-point rating. The clinical implications of the findings are discussed along with proposed modifications to the training procedure to guide future research.

Graduate Student Clinicians' Perceptions of Child Speech Sound Errors.

Purpose: Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rely on auditory perception to form judgments on child speech. This can be challenging for graduate student clinicians with limited clinical experience as they often need to judge children's speech errors using their auditory perception. This study examined how consistently graduate student clinicians used a 3-point perceptual rating scale to judge child speech. Method: Twenty-four graduate student clinicians rated single words produced by children with typically developing speech and language skills and children with speech sound disorders. All participants rated the productions using a 3-point scale, where "2" was an accurate production, "1" was a close approximation, and "0" was an inaccurate production. Ratings were solely based on the auditory signal. These ratings were compared to a consensus rating formed by two experienced SLPs. Results: Graduate student clinicians reached substantial agreement with the expert SLP rating. They reached the highest percentage agreement when rating accurate productions, and the lowest agreement when rating inaccurate productions. Conclusions: Graduate student clinicians reached substantial agreement with expert SLP rating in judging child speech using a 3-point scale when provided with detailed descriptions of each rating category. These results are consistent with previous findings on the role that clinical experience plays in speech error perception tasks and highlight the need for additional listening training in speech-language pathology graduate programs.

Rhyme Awareness in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Exploratory Study.

Phonological awareness is a critical component of phonological processing that predicts children's literacy outcomes. Phonological awareness skills enable children to think about the sound structure of words and facilitates decoding and the analysis of words during spelling. Past research has shown that children's vocabulary knowledge and working memory capacity are associated with their phonological awareness skills. Linguistic characteristics of words, such as phonological neighborhood density and orthography congruency have also been found to influence children's performance in phonological awareness tasks. Literacy is a difficult area for deaf and hard of hearing children, who have poor phonological awareness skills. Although cochlear implantation (CI) has been found to improve these children's speech and language outcomes, limited research has investigated phonological awareness in children with CI. Rhyme awareness is the first level of phonological awareness to develop in children with normal hearing (NH). The current study investigates whether rhyme awareness in children with NH (n = 15, median age = 5; 5, IQR = 11 ms) and a small group of children with CI (n = 6, median age = 6; 11.5, IQR = 3.75 ms) is associated with individual differences in vocabulary and working memory. Using a rhyme oddity task, well-controlled for perceptual similarity, we also explored whether children's performance was associated with linguistic characteristics of the task items (e.g., rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency). Results indicate that there is an association between vocabulary and working memory and performance in a rhyme awareness task in NH children. Only working memory was correlated with rhyme awareness performance in CI children. Linguistic characteristics of the task items, on the other hand, were not found to be associated with success. Implications of the results and future directions are discussed.