Intelligibility Evaluation

In the following section, a number of procedures that have been used for the assessment of speech intelligibility in children are reviewed. The procedures include some methods designed for immediate clinical application, some that were developed for specific research purposes, and some that were targeted for a particular population.
There are five principal categories of assessment procedures available for the evaluation of children’s intelligibility based on a comprehensive review by Kent, Miolo, and Bloedel (1994):
Group 1. Procedures That Emphasize Phonetic Contrast Analyses (e.g., CID word SPINE; Monsen, 1981; Test of Children’s Speech (TOCS); Hodge, 1992). Group 2. Procedures That Emphasize Phonetical Analyses (e.g., Assessment of Phonological

When intervention is being planned for a child with severe unintelligibility, it may be worthwhile to invest more time in intelligibility testing to obtain information on various factors that contribute to intelligibility. These factors may include relative accuracy of various phonetic contrasts, naturalness and appropriateness of prosodic variations, and use of clarification and repair strategies (R. D. Kent et al., 1994).
Again, it worth noting that Intelligibility is a complex property of speech, and clinical assessment may require more than a unidimensional examination. Some possibilities include a measure of communication efficiency, based on rate of production of intelligible utterances (e.g., Yorkston & Beukelman, 1981); the effect of situational or communication variables (e.g., background noise, speaking rate, linguistic complexity of utterance); and comparison of different responses (e.g., picture naming, repetition, and sentence completion). For example, it is well known that the presence of background noise reduces intelligibility. This effect of background noise on intelligibility is likely to be significantly greater for disordered speech than normal speech; however, the extent of the effect is

The adapted International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health: Children and Youth Version (ICF-CY) for use with children and adolescents aged 0 to 18 was another attempt to classify the pediatric functional health issues and first published in 2007. In contrast to ICIDH, the ICF/ICF-CY includes variables external to the individual, identifying and incorporating aspects such as a person’s daily activities, social participation, and contextual factors. In this approach, disabilities are more seen as arising from an interactive relationship between internal/personal and external/ environmental variables (McLeod & McCormack, 2007; McLeod & Threats, 2008).The ICF-CY provides a framework for conceptualizing individuals' Body Structures and Functions (e.g., articulation functions), the interrelationship between Activities and Participation (e.g., the ability to hold a conversation), and Environmental and Personal Factors. According to the ICF, functioning and disability are outcomes of interactions between a disorder and contextual factors