Background: The degree of a child’s speech intelligibility significantly affects how they function, not only communicatively but also socially, educationally and emotionally. Initially, a child’s communicative partners are limited to immediate family members with this audience gradually widening.
Speech intelligibility, or successful message transfer, is first evaluated by the child’s caregivers and later by the widening audience.

Aims: This study aims to determine if parental judgments of speech intelligibility are accurate predictors of speech intelligibility as judged by novel communicative partners.

Method: Twenty-eight typically developing Hebrew-speaking children were recruited. Parents’ judgments of their children’s intelligibility were obtained from the HEB-ICS (Intelligibility in Context Scale). Novel judgments of the children’s intelligibility were obtained from 35 adults interpretating recordings of 32 words, 10 sentences and one picture description. The accuracy of the adult judges’ interpretations relative to the target utterances was then compared to the HEB-ICS scores. This research was carried out with the approval of the Research Ethics Committee of the academic institution of the first author.

Results: A significant correlation was found between the HEB-ICS and the judges’ interpretations for words and sentences (but not for picture descriptions).

Conclusions: Parental judgments of speech intelligibility, as measured by the HEB-ICS, is an accurate predictor of the intelligibility of a speaker in real communicative situations with novel listeners at word and sentence level. The lack of correlation with the judges’ interpretations of picture descriptions requires further investigation and explanation.

Implications for children and families: You as parents can rely on your evaluations of your children’s intelligibility as an indicator of how well they will communicate with a wider communicative audience.

Implications for practitioners: You can use the HEB-ICS as an indicator of children’s current level of speech intelligibility in real-life communication situations and to track progress in therapy.

Funding: This research was funded by research grants to the authors from their respective academic institutions.

Key words: communication, quantitative methods

This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
• SDG 4: Quality Education
• SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities
• SDG 17: Partnerships to Achieve the Goals