Publication: The Speech Intelligibility of Jamaican Creole-speaking children

Last night we found out that our paper describing a new measure of speech intelligibility for children who speak Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English was accepted. Three of the five authors are in Philadelphia for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Convention and were able to celebrate together and plan future work.

Professor McLeod, Dr Washington and I

Washington, K. N., McDonald, M. M., McLeod, S., Crowe, K., & Devonish, H. (2016, in press November). Validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale for Jamaican Creole-speaking preschoolers. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

Purpose: To describe validation of the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod et al., 2012a) and ICS-Jamaican Creole (ICS-JC; McLeod et al., 2012b; Washington & Devonish Trans.) in a sample of typically-developing 3-to-6-year-old Jamaicans.

Method: One-hundred and forty-five preschooler-parent dyads participated. Parents completed the 7-item ICS (n=145) and ICS-JC (n=98) to rate children’s speech intelligibility (5-point scale) across communication-partners (parents, immediate-family, extended-family, friends, acquaintances, strangers). Preschoolers completed the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (DEAP; Dodd et al., 2006) in English and JC to establish speech-sound competency. For this sample, we examined validity and reliability (inter-rater, test-rest, internal-consistency) evidence using measures of speech-sound production: (1) percentage-of-consonants-correct (PCC); (2) percentage-of-vowels-correct (PVC); and (3) percentage-of-phonemes-correct (PPC).

Results: ICS and ICS-JC ratings showed preschoolers were always-(5) to usually-(4) understood across communication-partners (ICS-mean=4.43; ICS-JC mean=4.50). Both tools demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α=.91), high inter-rater and test-retest reliability. Significant correlations between the two tools and between each measure and language-specific PCC, PVC, and PPC provided/demonstrated criterion-validity evidence. A positive correlation between the ICS and age further strengthened validity evidence for that measure.

Conclusions: Both tools show promising evidence of reliability and validity in describing functional speech-intelligibility for this group of typically-developing Jamaican preschoolers.