Speech-Language Outcomes in the COVID-19 Milieu for Multilingual Jamaican Preschoolers and Considerations for Telepractice Assessments.
Leslie E Kokotek, Karla N Washington, Barbara Jane Cunningham and 1 others
PMID 38573244WHAT IT FOUND
Telepractice assessments for multilingual Jamaican preschoolers showed mixed stability.
Parent reports remained reliable, but intelligibility ratings lost correlation in children with speech disorders. Production scores appeared higher during the pandemic, though poor internet access may have skewed results. Caution is needed when interpreting data from low-resource settings.
Key findings
01Parent-reported communicative participation scores (FOCUS) remained strongly correlated with total scores for both typically developing children and those with speech sound disorders, supporting their reliability in telepractice.
02For children with speech sound disorders, the correlation between English and Jamaican Creole intelligibility ratings disappeared during the pandemic, suggesting these perceptual measures may be less stable in remote contexts for this group.
03Children typically developing showed higher speech production accuracy scores during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic baselines, but these differences lost significance when controlling for telepractice technology quality.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The pandemic and baseline groups consisted of different children, not the same individuals over time. Many families used suboptimal technology (smartphones/tablets) and had internet speeds below recommended minimums, which may have affected audio quality and assessment validity. The sample size for the pandemic cohort was small (30 children). The study relied on parent report for intelligibility, which may be influenced by response bias or the unique home environment during lockdowns.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH). The second author contributed to the validation of the FOCUS measure but declared no relevant financial contributions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret higher speech production scores in telepractice assessments as evidence of improvement. The study found that these differences disappeared when controlling for technology quality, suggesting that poor internet access or device limitations may have masked errors or altered how speech was perceived and scored.