PURPOSE: There is an ongoing need to develop assessments of spontaneous speech that focus on whether the child's utterances are comprehensible to listeners. This study sought to identify the attributes of a stable ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility, which enabled examining the criterion-related validity of an orthography-based measure of the comprehensibility of conversational speech in students with Down syndrome. METHOD: Participants were 10 elementary school students with Down syndrome and 4 unfamiliar adult raters. Averaged across-observer Likert ratings of speech comprehensibility were called a ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility. The proportion of utterance attempts fully glossed constituted an orthography-based measure of speech comprehensibility. RESULTS: Averaging across 4 raters on four 5-min segments produced a reliable (G = .83) ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility. The ratings-based measure was strongly (r > .80) correlated with the orthography-based measure for both the same and different conversational samples. CONCLUSION: Reliable and valid measures of speech comprehensibility are achievable with the resources available to many researchers and some clinicians.
PURPOSE: There is an ongoing need to develop assessments of spontaneous speech that focus on whether the child's utterances are comprehensible to listeners. This study sought to identify the attributes of a stable ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility, which enabled examining the criterion-related validity of an orthography-based measure of the comprehensibility of conversational speech in students with Down syndrome. METHOD:Participants were 10 elementary school students with Down syndrome and 4 unfamiliar adult raters. Averaged across-observer Likert ratings of speech comprehensibility were called a ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility. The proportion of utterance attempts fully glossed constituted an orthography-based measure of speech comprehensibility. RESULTS: Averaging across 4 raters on four 5-min segments produced a reliable (G = .83) ratings-based measure of speech comprehensibility. The ratings-based measure was strongly (r > .80) correlated with the orthography-based measure for both the same and different conversational samples. CONCLUSION: Reliable and valid measures of speech comprehensibility are achievable with the resources available to many researchers and some clinicians.
Authors: Kacie Dunham; Jacob I Feldman; Yupeng Liu; Margaret Cassidy; Julie G Conrad; Pooja Santapuram; Evan Suzman; Alexander Tu; Iliza Butera; David M Simon; Neill Broderick; Mark T Wallace; David Lewkowicz; Tiffany G Woynaroski Journal: Am J Intellect Dev Disabil Date: 2020-07-01