Children's, Parents', and Experts' Perception of Speech and Communication

This study aims to improve our knowledge of how young children with speech sound disorders (SSD) perceive their own speech and communication in comparison with typically developing (TD) children and how these perceptions relate to parental judgment of communicative participation, intelligibility in different contexts, and an expert measure of children's speech accuracy (percentage of consonants correct in syllable initial position [PCCI]).

Participants were 111 Dutch-speaking children (48-89 months old): 65 with SSD and 46 who were TD. Children's self-reports on the Dutch version of the Communication Attitude Test for Preschool and Kindergarten Children Who Stutter (KiddyCAT-NL) were compared (a) between SSD and TD groups and (b) with the parents' ratings. Parents' ratings were obtained from two parental questionnaires: Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six-34: Dutch (FOCUS-34NL) measuring communicative participation and the Intelligibility in Context Scale: Dutch (ICS-NL). The KiddyCAT-NL, FOCUS-34NL, and ICS-NL outcomes were also compared with (c) speech accuracy measured by speech-language pathologists (SLPs) as the PCCI using the picture-naming task of the Computer Articulation Instrument.

Statistical analysis revealed that young children in the SSD group perceived their speech and communication differently than children in the TD group. Only in the SSD group was there a moderate positive correlation between speech accuracy and intelligibility in context and only a weak correlation with the child's perception of speech and communication. Parents' and children's perceptions were weakly correlated.

Information on children's perception of their own speech is complementary to information obtained from the parents and SLPs' formal assessment of speech accuracy. To fully understand the impact of SSD, it is therefore important to actively elicit and include children's perspectives on speech and communication.