Current Research

Speech-language pathologists (SLP) make impressionistic speech intelligibility judgments of spontaneous speech samples (e.g., conversational speech) as part of their assessments of children for speech sound disorder. However, since judgments of intelligibility are established with an auditory-perceptual assessment of spontaneous speech by a clinician, they are susceptible to a variety of sources of error and biasing effects of speaker characteristics (Kent, 1996). This is particularly an issue with bilingual children who are disproportionately misidentified as having speech and language impairments (Artiles et al., 2002; Cycyk et al., 2022; Sullivan, 2011). When trained and untrained listeners were provided with visual information (i.e., physical appearance) about a child speaker’s race, it impacted their assessment of speech production accuracy (Evans et al., 2018). So if a listener expects a child’s speech to sound a particular way based on their physical appearance, they anticipate and make judgments based on those expectations. In particular, listeners’ beliefs about a speaker’s ethnic and/or linguistic background influence the way they perceive speech by either inhibiting or facilitating accurate perception (Kutlu et al., 2022; Melguy & Johnson, 2021; Vaughn, 2019). 

Given this background, we wondered if bilingual SLPs would rate the intelligibility of bilingual speakers differently than monolingual SLPs would. To answer this research question, we collected perceiver data using video and audio-only recordings of three child speaker groups which included a monolingual English control group, a bilingual Spanish-English group, and a bilingual Mam-English group. Note that Mam is a Mayan language spoken in Central America that is not related to Spanish and thus has different sounds and language structures. Additionally, all monolingual-English children were White (given the demographic of the recruitment area) and the Spanish- and Mam-English bilingual children were Hispanic. The goal of this research was to improve the multicultural sensitivity of SLPs to reduce the number of bilingual children who are misidentified as having speech and language impairments. By understanding what influences SLPs when they are making speech intelligibility judgments of spontaneous speech, graduate-level training and assessment procedures can be modified so they are less biased.