Abstract
Purpose: To evaluate instruments designed to assess children's speech production in languages other than English.
Method: Ninety-eight speech assessments in languages other than English were identified: 62 were commercially published, 17 published within journal articles, and 19 informal assessments. A review was undertaken of 30 commercially published assessments that could be obtained.
Results: The 30 instruments assessed 19 languages: Cantonese, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Maltese-English, Norwegian, Pakistani-heritage languages (Mirpuri, Punjabi, Urdu), Portuguese, Putonghua (Mandarin), Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The majority (70.0%) assessed speech sound production in monolingual speakers, 20.0% assessed one language of bilingual speakers, and 10.0% assessed both languages of bilingual speakers. All used single word picture elicitation. Approximately half (53.3%) were norm-referenced and the number of children in the normative samples ranged between 145 and 2,568. The remaining assessments were criterion-referenced (50.0%) (one fitted both categories). The assessments with English manuals met many of the psychometric criteria for operationalization; however, only two provided sensitivity and specificity data.
Conclusions: Despite the varying countries of origin, there were many similarities between speech assessments in languages other than English. Few were designed for use with multilingual children so validation is required for use in English-speaking contexts.
Method: Ninety-eight speech assessments in languages other than English were identified: 62 were commercially published, 17 published within journal articles, and 19 informal assessments. A review was undertaken of 30 commercially published assessments that could be obtained.
Results: The 30 instruments assessed 19 languages: Cantonese, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Maltese-English, Norwegian, Pakistani-heritage languages (Mirpuri, Punjabi, Urdu), Portuguese, Putonghua (Mandarin), Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The majority (70.0%) assessed speech sound production in monolingual speakers, 20.0% assessed one language of bilingual speakers, and 10.0% assessed both languages of bilingual speakers. All used single word picture elicitation. Approximately half (53.3%) were norm-referenced and the number of children in the normative samples ranged between 145 and 2,568. The remaining assessments were criterion-referenced (50.0%) (one fitted both categories). The assessments with English manuals met many of the psychometric criteria for operationalization; however, only two provided sensitivity and specificity data.
Conclusions: Despite the varying countries of origin, there were many similarities between speech assessments in languages other than English. Few were designed for use with multilingual children so validation is required for use in English-speaking contexts.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 708-723 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2014 |