Transcribing multilingual children's and adults' speech

Area of Science:

• Speech-Language Pathology
• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Diagnosing speech sound disorders (SSD) in multilingual children presents challenges due to cross-linguistic influences.
• Existing assessment tools may not adequately address the complexities of bilingual phonology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of the VietSpeech Multilingual Transcription Protocol for impressionistic transcription of Vietnamese-English bilingual children's speech.
• To assess inter-rater reliability in transcribing multilingual speech using a collaborative team approach.

Main Methods:

• A 4-step protocol including team training, bilingual speech assessment (DEAP and VSA), transcription comparison, and rule generation for consensus.
• Data collected from 69 Vietnamese-Australian children and 85 adult family members.
• Inter-rater reliability calculated for consonant-by-consonant agreement.

Main Results:

• High inter-rater agreement achieved for both English (92.62% for children, 88.69% for adults) and Vietnamese (86.57% for children, 96.05% for adults).
• Significant correlations found between speech accuracy and inter-rater reliability for children's consonants in both languages, and adults' in English.
• Transcription reliability was influenced by phoneme class and shared phonemes between languages.

Conclusions:

• The VietSpeech protocol, utilizing multilingual teams and specific training, supports SLPs in transcribing multilingual speech accurately.
• Collaboration and awareness of individual limitations are crucial for effective multilingual speech assessment and diagnosis of SSD.