Development of Phonetic Accuracy and Speech Intelligibility in Tamil Speaking Typically Developing Children

Abstract

Intelligibility can play a major role in communication systems. The aim of the study is to investigate the development of phonetic accuracy and speech intelligibility in typically developing (TD) Tamil speaking children and to find the relation between phonetic accuracy as measured using Percentage of phoneme correct and speech intelligibility rating. A total of 150 TD native Tamil speaking children between the age range of 2 and 6.11 years participated in the study. These children were further divided into 5 groups. Stimuli consisted of 9 sentences and 15 words in Tamil. Each child was seated comfortably and pictures of the words and sentences were randomly presented one after the other. The investigator said the word/sentence as the respective picture was shown, and the child was instructed to repeat the word/sentence after the investigator. The responses of the children were audio recorded using wavesufer software through a laptop. The investigator listened to the recorded samples, transcribed and identified the correct/incorrect phonemes. Phonetic accuracy was determined using PPC. Results revealed that PPC and speech intelligibility increased with age.