Reliability and validity of nasality ratings between a monolingual and bilingual listener for speech samples from...

This study sought to determine if a monolingual English listener could rate nasality in English and in Spanish with the same proficiency as a bilingual English-Spanish listener, and to compare nasalance scores with nasality ratings.

Speakers for this study were 26 bilingual English-Spanish-speaking children. Speech samples and nasalance scores were obtained simultaneously as each speaker recited one English sentence and one Spanish sentence. A monolingual listener and a bilingual listener rated nasality.

For the English sentences, the intrajudge correlation coefficient was r = 0.89 for the monolingual listener and r = 0.89 for the bilingual listener. For the Spanish sentences, the intrajudge correlation coefficient was r = 0.91 for the monolingual listener and r = 0.92 for the bilingual listener. Interjudge agreement was r = 0.86 for rating English sentences and r = 0.78 for rating Spanish sentences. All correlation coefficients were significant (p < 0.001). The correlation coefficients between nasality ratings and nasalance scores were essentially the same for both listeners and both languages.

A monolingual and a bilingual judge had high agreement on ratings of nasality for English and Spanish speech. The relationship between nasalance and nasality was not different across languages.