Phonological Assessment Instrument: evidence of reliability.
Giovana Sopezack Alves, Camila Botura, Ana Carolina Sartori Bernardi and 1 others
PMID 37970894WHAT IT FOUND
Different therapists scoring the same child's speech with this tool reached the same conclusion about how severe the disorder is.
The scores also remained stable when the same therapist re-scored the audio months later. This supports using the tool for consistent clinical assessment.
Key findings
01The agreement between different evaluators and between the same evaluator at different times was excellent for classifying the degree of speech severity.
02The instrument showed high consistency in how its items relate to each other when assessing phonemes.
03Most phonemes showed excellent or good agreement between evaluators, though some specific sounds had moderate or weak agreement.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study only included children from a public school in one region of Brazil, so results may not apply to other groups. The children's hearing was not checked with standardized tests, so subtle hearing issues might have affected how judges scored the audio. The group of children was very similar, which can make statistical agreement scores look lower than they actually are in a mixed population. Reliability was not checked separately for different ages or genders.
Declared interests
No specific conflicts of interest or funding sources were declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume the tool is equally reliable for every single speech sound. While the overall severity score is consistent, agreement between judges was moderate or weak for some specific phonemes, so rely on the broader pattern of errors rather than the score of one isolated sound.