Parent-rated measures of bilingual children’s speech accuracy: Implications for a universal speech screen

Abstract

Purpose: This study investigated whether parents were reliable in judging their bilingual children’s speech and whether parent-rated measure of children’s speech could be used as a tool for a universal speech screen to identify children with speech sound disorder (SSD).

Method: Single word samples from 33 Korean–English bilingual (KEB) pre-school children were analysed for percentage of consonants correct (PCC). Their parents completed the Intelligibility in Context Scale and a similarly constructed scale devised by Stertzbach and Gildersleeve-Neumann. Spearman rank correlations were used to examine the association between the PCC scores and the parent-rated measures.

Result: A number of factors influenced parents’ reliability in judging their bilingual children’s speech, including language dominance and the nature of the questions that were asked. The perception of strangers on a child’s speech problems, as judged by the parents, could be significant in identifying children with SSD. When the cut-off ICS mean score derived from a previous monolingual research was applied to KEB children, over 40% of the sample was identified as requiring a comprehensive clinical assessment.

Conclusion: Implementation of a universal speech screen utilising parent-rated measures of children’s speech cannot be introduced without further research.

Keywords:

• Speech screen
• bilingualism
• speech sound disorder

Acknowledgement

This study was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2012-BAA-2101) to the first author. The first author would also like to acknowledge Avinesh Pillai (Statistical Consulting Centre, Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland) for his statistical support.