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Parent-rated measures of bilingual children's speech accuracy: Implications for a universal speech screen
Jae-Hyun Kim1,2, Elaine Ballard2, Clare M McCann2,3
1a College of Healthcare Sciences, James Cook University , Townsville, Queensland , Australia .
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.
