A review of 30 speech assessments in 19 languages other than English.
OBJECTIVE
In this study, the authors aimed to evaluate instruments designed to assess children's speech production in languages other than English.


METHODS
Ninety-eight speech assessments in languages other than English were identified: 62 were commercially published, 17 published within journal articles, and 19 informal assessments. A review was undertaken of 30 commercially published assessments that could be obtained.


RESULTS
The 30 instruments assessed 19 languages: Cantonese, Danish, Finnish, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Maltese-English, Norwegian, Pakistani-heritage languages (Mirpuri, Punjabi, Urdu), Portuguese, Putonghua (Mandarin), Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. The majority (70.0%) assessed speech sound production in monolingual speakers, 20.0% assessed one language of bilingual speakers, and 10.0% assessed both languages of bilingual speakers. All used single-word picture elicitation. Approximately half (53.3%) were norm-referenced, and the number of children in the normative samples ranged between 145 and 2,568. The remaining assessments were criterion-referenced (50.0%) (one fitted both categories). The assessments with English manuals met many of the psychometric criteria for operationalization; however, only 2 provided sensitivity and specificity data.


CONCLUSIONS
Despite the varying countries of origin, there were many similarities between speech assessments in languages other than English. Few were designed for use with multilingual children, so validation is required for use in English-speaking contexts.
Sharynne
S
McLeod
Sarah
S
Verdon
D002648:Child; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D011594:Psychometrics; D012660:Semantics; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement