Characterizing Communicative Participation in Multilingual Jamaican Preschoolers.

Abstract

This study characterized communicative participation and related aspects of functional communication for Jamaican Creole (JC)-English-speaking preschoolers with and without functionally defined speech sound disorders (fSSDs). This study included parent reports and direct assessment measures from an existing corpus of baseline data collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The communicative participation of typically developing (TD; n = 226) bilingual JC-English-speaking preschoolers and those with fSSDs (n = 39) was documented using the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS). Functional speech intelligibility was recorded using the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) in English and JC (ICS-JC). Objective measures of speech production were collected through direct child assessment in both languages and then transcribed and calculated for percent of consonants (PCC), vowels (PVC), and phonemes correct (PPC). Within-group relationships were explored using association testing, and differences between groups were explored through multivariate analyses. FOCUS scores and ICS and ICS-JC scores were found to be minimally to moderately related for Jamaican preschoolers in the TD group (r = .28-.34, p < .002) and strongly related in the fSSD group (r = .56-.60, p < .002). No relations were observed between the FOCUS scores and PCC/PVC/PPC in either language. There was a statistically significant difference between all FOCUS scores for Jamaican preschoolers in the TD and fSSD groups (p ≤ .002). These findings provide additional evidence for using the FOCUS beyond documenting change in communicative participation to support clinical decision-making in planning and developing speech-language interventions. This study also documents an important characterization of JC-English-speaking children with and without fSSDs, offering data on children's abilities that can be used in future comparisons of communicative participation and speech functioning observed during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.