Correspondence between consonant inventories obtained using modified naturalistic listening in real time (NLRT) and parent report.
Mary A Hardin-Jones, Ann E Dahill, Libby Heimbaugh and 3 others
PMID 38422565WHAT IT FOUND
Parent report and modified naturalistic listening agreed on only 13% of toddlers' consonant inventory sizes.
Parents missed the glottal [h] and glides, but agreed with coders on 87% of stops, the category clinicians watch for velopharyngeal closure post-surgery.
Key findings
01Coders and parents agreed on the size of the consonant inventory for only nine of the 70 children (13%), and the correlation between the two measures was moderate (r=.34).
02Parents frequently failed to report the glottal [h] and the glides [w] and [j], which coders identified in the majority of children.
03Despite missing other sounds, parents and coders agreed on the presence or absence of stops for 87% of the children, a category critical for monitoring velopharyngeal closure.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study was limited to a specific population: toddlers with repaired cleft palate. Velopharyngeal issues in this group may affect sound salience and listener identification differently than in typically developing children. Parents were asked to identify sounds heard in words or babbling, but all examples provided were word-based. This may have led parents to underreport sounds that occurred only in babbling or in non-initial word positions. The audio samples used by coders represented only a small window of time (40 minutes total) compared to the continuous exposure parents have to their child, creating a potential sampling error for both methods.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that parent report is generally unreliable for consonant inventories in this population. The disagreement was driven by parents missing specific, less salient sounds like [h] and glides. For the clinically critical category of stops, parent report and coders agreed 87% of the time.