Criterion validity of the Viking Speech Scale

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Do subjective ratings of the intelligibility of the speech of children with cerebral palsy using the Viking Speech Scale accurately predict the percentage of words understood correctly?

• IRAS ID

  158979

• Contact name

  Lindsay Pennington

• Contact email

  lindsay.pennington@ncl.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  Newcsatle University

• Research summary

  Cerebral palsy (CP) is a developmental motor disorder that affects an individual’s ability to move, maintain balance and posture. It is caused by damage to the developing brain before, during or following birth. CP affects two to three
  children in one thousand live births.
  Many children with CP have difficulties speaking, which limits their access to social and educational activities. The most frequent speech impairment in CP is a motor speech disorder called dysarthria. Key features of dysarthria are shallow, irregular breathing, harsh sounding voice, hypernasal speech and imprecise articulation. Often the naturalness of speech, also referred to as intonation, is reduced as well. Dysarthria reduces the intelligibility of speech, i.e. the number of words that listeners can understand.

  The Viking Speech Scale is a new classification of the subjective severity of children's speech disorder, which has been developed for research and clinical practice. The system rates presence and severity of dysarthria, using subjective estimates of intelligibility to unfamiliar listeners as its anchor points. This study will test if the Viking Speech Scale accurately predicts the objective percentage intelligibility of children with cerebral palsy.
  We will use recordings of the speech of children with cerebral palsy that have been made for previous studies in UK and in US. Each recording has already been heard by unfamiliar listeners and the percentage of words understood in each recording has been calculated in the previous research. In this study we will rate the intelligibility of the children from the recordings using the Viking Speech Scale, blind to the objective intelligibility percentage. We will test the strength with which the subjective ratings of intelligibility made using the Viking Speech Scale predicts the percentage of words actually understood.
  In the study we will use previously collected, anonymised data.

• REC name

  East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 2

• REC reference

  14/ES/1040

• Date of REC Opinion

  24 Jul 2014

• REC opinion

  Unfavourable Opinion