A Correlational Study: the 1-Minute Measure of Homonymy and Intelligibility

Identifying the severity level of unintelligibility objectively and efficiently holds critical clinical implications for speech assessment and intervention needs. The speech of children who demonstrate phonological deviations is frequently unintelligible. The use of an accurate and time-efficient measurement of intelligibility is necessary to screen children who may be producing phonological patterns that contribute to significantly reduced intelligibility in connected speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate the degree of concurrent validity between scores received on the 1-Minute Measure of Homonymy and Intelligibility (Hodson, 1992) and speech intelligibility as measured by the percent of words understood in connected speech. For this investigation, intelligibility is operationally defined as the percent of words understood in a connected speech sample derived from orthographic transcription. Data collected were from 48 children, aged 4:0 to 5:6, who demonstrated varying levels of phonological proficiency/deficiency. A group of four listeners who had experience treating children with phonological disorders were responsible for completing orthographic transcriptions of the 48 connected speech samples. The two methods of assessing speech intelligibility investigated in this study were found to correlate highly (r = .84). This is considered a significant statistical correlation and therefore the 1-Minute Measure may be used to provide speech-language pathologists with valuable information to predict a child\u27s intelligibility level in connected speech. A regression formula was employed to predict percentage of intelligibility when presented with a child\u27s 1-Minute Measure score. Results from this correlational study suggest that the 1-Minute Measure of Homonymy and Intelligibility may serve as an assessment tool that can provide a speech-language pathologist with some valuable information pertaining to a child\u27s level of intelligibility in connected speech. When used with another speech assessment tool, the 1-Minute Measure may function as a screening measure to identify preschoolers who produce phonological deviations that interfere with intelligibility of conversational speech