Preliminary results of an intelligibility measure for English-speaking children with cleft palate

This study describes a preliminary evaluation of the construct and concurrent validity of the Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate.

The study used a prospective between-groups design with convenience samples.

Participants (ages 39 to 82 months) included 5 children with cleft palate and 10 children with typical speech development and no history of craniofacial abnormalities. All children had age-appropriate language skills.

Each child completed the Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate by imitating single words. Each child's word productions were recorded and played back to listeners who completed open-set and closed-set response tasks. Recorded utterances that represented a contiguous 100-word sample of each child's spontaneous speech also were played back to listeners for completion of an open-set word identification task.

Measures reported include group means for (1) intelligibility scores for the open-set Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate and spontaneous speech sample conditions, and (2) percentage of phonetic contrasts correct and correct-distorted from the Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate closed-set response task.

The group of children with cleft palate had significantly lower intelligibility scores, lower percentage of correct phonetic contrasts, and higher percentage of correct distorted items (construct validity). A strong positive correlation (r = .88, p < .01) was found between intelligibility scores from the Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate and the spontaneous sample (concurrent validity).

The results provide preliminary support for the construct and concurrent validities of the Speech Intelligibility Probe for Children With Cleft Palate as a measure of children's speech intelligibility.