VIDBE-Q Volume 65 Issue 3
the speech-language pathologists interviewed reported using imitation of the words
targeted by standardized assessments of speech sound production as a testing
modification.
An alternative to standardized assessments of speech production is to
analyze children's conversational speech samples (cf., LeZak & Starbuck, 1964;
Mills, 1987), but sampling has many drawbacks. Speech samples may not elicit the
entire English language inventory of 44 phonemes because there is a chance that
the speaker may not have the opportunity to produce every speech sound. The
topics at hand may not lend themselves to producing this variety of sounds.
Sampling accuracy could suffer if examinees consciously or unconsciously avoid
producing the speech sounds they have difficulty saying. Spontaneous sampling
may not yield much information about children with very poor speech sound
production and with speech that is hard to understand because the examiner may
not be able to discern a portion of the children's intended speech sound
productions. In such cases, sampling can yield a paucity of data. In addition,
speech sampling is more time intensive than testing using a published standardized
measure (Baumann-Waengler, 2012).
To summarize, current measures of speech sound production are inadequate
for children with VI. First, the visual design of these measures do not allow for
spontaneous productions, which is the desired procedure when clinicians assess
