Parent-rated measures of bilingual children's speech accuracy: implications for a universal speech screen

Purpose: This study investigated whether parents were reliable in judging their bilingual childrens speech and whether parent-rated measure of childrens speech could be used as a tool for a universal speech screen to identify children with speech sound disorder (SSD).Method: Single word samples from 33 Korean-English bilingual (KEB) pre-school children were analysed for percentage of consonants correct (PCC). Their parents completed the Intelligibility in Context Scale and a similarly constructed scale devised by Stertzbach and Gildersleeve-Neumann. Spearman rank correlations were used to examine the association between the PCC scores and the parent-rated measures.Result: A number of factors influenced parents reliability in judging their bilingual childrens speech, including language dominance and the nature of the questions that were asked. The perception of strangers on a childs speech problems, as judged by the parents, could be significant in identifying children with SSD. When the cut-off ICS mean score derived from a previous monolingual research was applied to KEB children, over 40% of the sample was identified as requiring a comprehensive clinical assessment.Conclusion: Implementation of a universal speech screen utilising parent-rated measures of childrens speech cannot be introduced without further research.