Bias in the perception of phonetic detail in children's speech: A comparison of categorical and continuous rating scales.
Benjamin Munson, Sarah K Schellinger, Jan Edwards
PMID 27736242WHAT IT FOUND
Continuous ratings of children's /s/ and /θ/ productions did not shift when listeners also judged vowels or gender.
Binary judgments changed how listeners used some sound features. In this lab study, continuous ratings were less biased by these tasks.
Key findings
01Continuous ratings of consonant goodness did not differ between the vowel block and the gender block.
02Listeners did not become more or less continuous in their ratings when their attention was drawn to vowel categories or gender typicality.
03Binary /s/ versus /θ/ judgments changed with the block in how listeners used two sound features.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The raters were adult volunteers, mostly university students or staff, and not described as clinicians. The recordings came from typically developing children, not children with speech sound disorders. Only 19 adults in Experiment 1 and 21 adults in Experiment 2 rated the stimuli. The study did not measure inter-rater or intra-rater reliability. The biasing task was a specific lab manipulation, and the paper says it is unclear whether results generalize to other divided or focused attention conditions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that continuous rating scales should replace categorical transcription in clinical work. The study tested adult listeners rating lab recordings, not clinicians assessing patients, and it did not measure inter-rater reliability.