Just published: Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient?

The following book chapter from Kate Margetson's PhD has just been published. Congratulations Kate on this important research. (P. S. Unsurprisingly, the answer to the question posed in the title is "no" - but the evidence is fascinating)

Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2024). Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English-speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient? In E. Babatsouli (Ed.). Multilingual acquisition and learning: A ecosystemic view to diversity. (pp. 217-245). John Benjamins Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.08mar 

Here is the abstract

Multilingual children suspected of having speech sound disorders (SSD) are often only assessed in English due to challenges facing speech-language pathologists (SLPs) such as inadequate resources, lack of access to multilingual SLPs or interpreters, and limited SLP knowledge and skill in assessing unfamiliar lanquages. This paper describes the speech profiles and diagnostic decision-making for four bilingual Vietnamese-English speaking children aged 4-6 years. When using English-only assessment all children were diagnosed with SSD. When assessed in English and Vietnamese, only two children were diagnosed with SSD. Many mismatches could be explained by cross-linguistic transfer and ambient phonology. These different diagnostic outcomes demonstrate that direct speech assessment in home language(s) and English is essential for accurate diagnosis of SSD in multilingual children.

DELAD workshop

https://www.clarin.eu/event/2022/delad-workshop-2022

 

Corpora of speech of individuals with communication disorders (CSD) are hard to obtain. They are costly to collect and difficult to share due to privacy issues. Moreover, they are often small in size and very specific in terms of communication impairments addressed. These factors make re-use a challenge on the one hand, and a necessity on the other. In the beginning, two of us (Ball & Müller) organised two workshops in Linköping, Sweden, in 2015 and 2016, in which available resources and issues related to accessibility were inventorised. These workshops resulted in the DELAD initiative (see http://delad.ruhosting.nl/).

 From these workshops it was concluded (1) that only a minority of existing CSD can be made accessible due to privacy constraints, and (2) that we now have limited knowhow to collect new CSD that can be shared according to FAIR principles, (3) that the CLARIN infrastructure is indispensable for this purpose. A third workshop was then organised in 2017 in Cork, Ireland with the support of CLARIN. Selected group of experts in communication disorders research and representatives from the CLARIN data centres were brought together to find solutions to issues such as design and implementation of a data repository, data type and formats, metadata categories and formats, IPR/ethics/consent forms, anonymization, as well as best practices and guidelines for data collection. The action plan resulting from the workshop included concrete initiatives related to the topics. 

 In January 2019 a fourth workshop was organised in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Key topics were legal and ethical aspects of collecting and hosting CSD and the establishment of relevant requirements for the infrastructure for securely sharing CSD. In January 2021 we organised a first online workshop and we will continue this in September this year. 

Here are the topics for our next DELAD workshop: Recent developments at ACE / DELAD for support of sharing CDS Sharing clinical data: Obtaining clinical data via hospitals vs Obtaining data outside clinical institutes from alternative organisations The impact of the Data Governance Act & Data Altruism Follow up on voice pseudonimisation And of course there will be plenty of time for researchers’ presentations on their data and options to share these. The workshop will be very interactive and participants are invited to actively participate in the discussions.

Difficulties conducting research - noisy environments

I am currently reading a draft research document - and was reminded of the difficulties in the field when trying to audio- and video-record young children's speech so that reliable speech transcription can be made and accurate data entry can be assured:

"The speech sample collection was not carried out if the assessment room had too much noise such as drilling machines, saws, wall demolition, continuous honking, etc. in the surrounding area."

It reminded me of conducting speech assessments in Vietnam in a room that was next to the parking area for parents' and teachers' motorbikes. We kept having to stop as people came and went.

VietSpeech transcription, data entry and analysis meeting

Tonight our VietSpeech research assistants met to discuss our transcription, data entry and analysis for Study 4. Transcription of data in two languages (English and Vietnamese) is complex and requires extensive checking and protocols to ensure accuracy. We have a fantastic team who are very rigorous  - ensuring a high level of confidence in our findings.

Katherine White, Sharynne McLeod, Lily To, Van Tran

Special issue: Transcription of Children's Speech

Over the past couple of years, Yvonne Wren, Sarah Verdon and I have been editing a special issue of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopedia on the topic of "Transcription of Children's Speech". We are pleased to announce it has just been published. It can be found here (https://www.karger.com/Journal/Issue/278480) and includes excellent papers from authors across the world (Canada, South Africa, UK, Ireland, US, Australia, and Vietnam). We undertook this task as part of being on the Child Speech Committee of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP).

VietSpeech Study 2 data analysis

Over the past 2 days Kate Margetson and I have worked systematically through the processes for transcription, reliability, consensus, and expert checking for the data from Study 2. Audrey Wang has begun transferring some of the data into SPSS. This is an exciting - but extensive phase in our study.

Sharynne, Kate and lots of VietSpeech files in Sydney

Special topic issue of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica: Transcription of Children’s Speech

In our roles on the Child Speech Committee of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP), Yvonne Wren, Sarah Verdon and I have been guest editors of a special topic issue of Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica titled Transcription of Children’s Speech. This week the entire issue has been finalised by the editor-in-chief Mike Robb and is ready for publication.
Here are the titles of the included papers:

1. Phonetic Transcription for Speech-Language Pathology in the 21st Century 
2. An Alternative Approach to Measuring Reliability of Transcription in Children’s Speech Samples: Extending the Concept of Near Functional Equivalence 
3. Transcription of Vietnamese Adults’ and Children’s Consonants by English-Speaking Speech-Language Pathologists 
4. Transcribing and Transforming: Towards Inclusive, Multilingual Child Speech Training for South African Speech-Language Therapy Students 
5. The Impact of Real-Time Articulatory Information on Phonetic Transcription: Ultrasound-Aided Transcription in Cleft Lip and Palate Speech 
6. Use of Transcription when Assessing Children’s Speech: Australian Speech-Language Pathologists’ Practices, Challenges, and Facilitators 
7. Percent Consonant Correct as an Outcome Measure for Cleft Speech in an Intervention Study
8.  Protocol for the Connected Speech Transcription of Children with Speech Disorders: An Example from Childhood Apraxia of Speech

Transcription of Vietnamese adults’ and children’s consonants by English-speaking speech-language pathologists

The following paper has been accepted for publication today:
Masso, S., McLeod, S., Cronin, A., & Phạm, B. (2019, in press April). Transcription of Vietnamese adults’ and children’s consonants by English-speaking speech-language pathologists. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopedia.

Here is the abstract:

Objective: To examine English-speaking speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) transcription of consonants in Vietnamese words and identification of correct/incorrect productions of Vietnamese children’s speech.
Participants and Methods: Twenty English-speaking SLPs completed three tasks. Task 1: transcription of 22 English words using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Task 2: transcription of 47 words spoken by Vietnamese adults. Task 3: transcription of 94 Vietnamese words spoken by Vietnamese children and identification of correct/incorrect productions. Participants completed questionnaires exploring language proficiency, transcription skill, musicality, and confidence with multilingual clients.
Results: Task 1: participants demonstrated good accuracy transcribing English words (M = 97.2%). Task 2: An average of 52.9% consonants were transcribed correctly (89.4% when Vietnamese–English common transcription errors were considered). Common transcription errors included voicing of plosives, place, and syllable-final omission. Accuracy was higher on shared English and Vietnamese consonantal articulations (e.g., /b/ and /m/). Task 3: On average SLPs correctly identified accuracy of 73.8% of Vietnamese children’s productions and transcribed 69.2% consonants correctly (83.8% when Vietnamese–English common transcription errors were considered). Musicality was correlated with SLPs’ accuracy of transcription.
Conclusion: English-speaking SLPs have some skills transcribing Vietnamese adults and transcribing and identifying correct/incorrect productions of children’s speech. SLPs may use knowledge of common transcription errors to support understanding of their transcription of speech.

RCSLT Child Speech Disorder Research Network

I was invited to join the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) Child Speech Disorder Research Network meeting at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.  It was a dynamic meeting of researchers from across the UK who are passionate about working in the field of children's speech.

• Here is their website: https://www.nbt.nhs.uk/bristol-speech-language-therapy-research-unit/bsltru-research/child-speech-disorder-research-network
• Their transcription guidelines (that we included in our Children's Speech book) are here.
• Their analysis guidelines will be completed soon.

Twitter post from CSDR Network

Child Speech Disorder Research Network