The perception of disordered /[inverted r]/ of children in speech therapy by peers and speech-language pathologists

Abstract

Subjective rating is the main method for measuring treatment effect for speech disorders in therapy and research. For complicated speech sounds such as Ul, perceptual judgments by ear are subject to variability. The main goals of the current study were twofold: (1) to compare age peer and speech-language pathologist judgments of Ul as spoken by children receiving speech therapy for Ul, and (2) to compare those listener judgments in both a single stimulus identification task and a two-stimulus paired comparison task. Sixteen syllables with lxl were presented by computer over headphones in the two tasks to 24 children (mean age 9 years) and 24 speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Variability, group and task differences were examined. Mean judgments of the tokens by SLPs and children were similar. Intra-rater reliability was better for SLPs than children. In the single stimulus identification task, SLPs also showed better inter-rater reliability than children. In the two-stimulus paired comparison task, SLPs and children had similar inter-rater reliability. Overall, the comparison task resulted in better inter-rater and intra-rater reliability for both groups. Implications for research and clinical evaluation of attempted Ul are discussed.