Development of an Arabic speech intelligibility test for children

Abstract

EnAbstract Objectives Speech intelligibility is usually expressed as a percentage of spoken words, sentences, or phonemes correctly identified by a listener or a group of listeners when spoken by a talker or a number of talkers. Communicative disorders could have a deleterious effect on speech intelligibility. To date, there are no Arabic tests measuring speech intelligibility. Aim It is necessary to develop and standardize an objective Arabic speech intelligibility test that can be used to estimate the degree of deterioration of speech intelligibility in communicative disorders as an attempt to develop a valid and a reliable tool to assess the efficacy of different therapy programs for different communicative disorders. Patients and methods This study was carried out on 200 children with an age range of 4–12 years whose language skills were either fully developed or equivalent for age. All children were selected randomly from the outpatient clinic of phoniatrics and had any of five selected speech disorders affecting speech intelligibility. Each child included in the study was subjected to two evaluations: a subjective rating of the child’s speech intelligibility and the developed Arabic speech intelligibility test, which is meant to be an objective measure. Results The results showed a highly significant correlation between the scores of the Arabic speech intelligibility test and the average scores given by raters, the average scores for words, and the average scores for sentences (0.92, 0.98, and 0.84, respectively). Conclusion The developed test is proven to be valid and reliable for measuring speech intelligibility in children and could be categorically classified according to ranges of severity.