JCPSLP November 2016

Figure 1. The authors of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment

Purpose The current purpose of the VSA is to describe children’s ability to produce consonants, semivowels, vowels, and tones in the northern, central, and southern Vietnamese dialects. Once normative data have been collected and analysed, the other purposes will be for diagnosis of speech sound disorders, to assist with goal setting for intervention, and to determine the outcomes of intervention. Intended population The VSA is designed for Vietnamese-speaking children ranging from 2;0 to 6;11 years who live in different regions of Viet Nam and in other countries. Children may be either monolingual or multilingual speakers. Examiners using the VSA should be speech-language pathologists, special educators, psychologists or other professionals who are Vietnamese native speakers with experience in Vietnamese phonetic transcription and working with children (Smit, 1986). It may be possible for non-Vietnamese-speaking speech-language pathologists to use the VSA with support from interpreters or family members (see McLeod, Verdon & IEPMCS, in press, for guidelines). Target skill The VSA has been designed as a picture-naming task to elicit single words. Scope The scope of the VSA includes the type of words selected and methods used to elicit target words. Six areas were considered to ensure the scope matched the purpose of VSA: phonotactic inventory, Vietnamese speech sounds, elicitation of each speech sound, word selection, presentation, and test administration.

Vietnamese phonotactic inventory Almost all words in Vietnamese are monosyllabic. The Vietnamese syllable is the smallest unit of pronunciation and Vietnamese is a syllable-timed language (in contrast to English, which is a stress-timed language). The structure of the Vietnamese syllable is: (C 1 )(w 1 )V(C 2 /w 2 )T where C1 is the initial consonant, w 1 is the medial semivowel, V is the main vowel, C 2 is the final consonant, w 2 is the final semivowel, and T is the tone (Pha. m & McLeod, 2016). The vowel and the tone are the two compulsory components, whereas, the presence of the other components is optional. The VSA contains all Vietnamese speech sounds in every possible position in the Vietnamese syllable as follows: initial consonant, medial semivowel, main vowel, final consonant, final semivowel, and tone. There are no consonant clusters in the Vietnamese language so that all Vietnamese speech sounds in the VSA are elicited in singleton contexts. Morphophonological contexts do not occur as the Vietnamese language does not use bounded morphemes to mark verb tense, aspect, or plurality (Pham, 2011). All stimuli in the VSA are monosyllabic words; the exception is the rare loan word for the initial consonant /p/ - pa-tê (pate). The classifiers, e.g., cái (inanimacy), con (animacy), are excluded although they commonly precede nouns (Pham & Kohnert, 2009; Tran, 2011). For example, the single word task elicited th ỏ (rabbit) instead of con thỏ ; and chuông (bell) instead of cái chuông . Vietnamese speech sounds The VSA includes all potential Vietnamese consonants, semivowels, vowels, and tones to assess speech production of Vietnamese-speaking children spoken in three main dialects. A comprehensive summary of all Vietnamese speech sounds in Standard Vietnamese and in

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JCPSLP Volume 18, Number 3 2016

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