VIDBE-Q Volume 65 Issue 3
Assessment of Speech Sound Production in Children with VI
The most common testing procedure utilized in the field of speech-language
pathology is to present a child with a set of common pictures or objects and ask the
child to use a single word to name each item shown. The names of the array of
items on the test are designed to elicit the full range of speech sounds, known as
phonemes, present in the child's language. However, these published tests of
speech sound production involve visual stimuli, and this precludes children with
VI from identifying the stimuli and spontaneously producing a response.
Speech-language pathologists assessing children with VI are likely to
modify the spontaneous naming of visual stimuli so that, instead, participants
would imitate the target words spoken by the examiner (Brouwer et al., 2013).
A modification generally refers to a change to a test that is thought to change what
is being measured (NCEO, 2014). In fact, imitation represents a change from the
spontaneous speech sound production behavior that is the objective of standardized
tests of speech sound production. A child's imitative productions may be unlike the
ways that the child would speak the words spontaneously (Siegel et al., 1963;
Smith & Ainsworth, 1967). However, because all current tests rely on picture cues,
speech-language pathologists report that imitation is often the only way to elicit the
full range of speech sounds necessary for assessment. In a study of the practices of
speech-language pathologists who serve children with VI, (Brouwer et al., 2013)
