JCPSLP Vol 17 No 1 2015_lores

Diversity in practice

Intelligibility in Context Scale A parent-report screening tool translated into 60 languages Sharynne McLeod

The Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) is a free parent-report screening tool that has been translated into 60 languages. The creation of the 7-item scale was informed by the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health. Translation and back translation into 60 languages has been undertaken internationally by speech pathologists, linguists, and translators. Since its creation, the ICS has been validated on 120 English- speaking children in Australia and 74 Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong. The ICS has been normed on 804 Australian English-speaking children and additional validation, norming, and clinical studies are underway in countries including: Brazil, Croatia, Fiji, Iceland, Iran, Israel, Jamaica, Germany, New Zealand, Slovenia, South Africa, and Sweden. The ICS is a promising screening measure for speech pathologists to use to consider parental perceptions of children’s intelligibility with different communicative partners. T he Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS; McLeod, Harrison & McCormack, 2012a) is parent-report screening tool of children’s intelligibility with different communicative partners. The seven questions relate to different communicative partners: the parent, immediate family members, extended family members, the child’s friends, acquaintances, teachers and strangers. Identification of these seven communicative partners was informed by the Support and Relationships chapter within the Environmental factors section of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health: Children and Youth (ICF-CY; World Health Organization, 2007). Parents rate their children’s ability to be understood by each of these communicative partners on a 5-point Likert scale ( always, usually, sometimes, rarely, never ) and an average score out of 5 is generated across the 7 items. Previous researchers have used parents as informants

about children’s intelligibility (Flipsen, 1995) and used rating scales for quantifying intelligibility (Kent, Miolo, & Bloedel, 1994). The ICS has been described as a measure of functional success that “permits one to gain inroads into what counts as a clinically, communicatively, as opposed to merely statistically significant change in intelligibility, either generally, or, more realistically, in relation to given listeners, in given situations” (Miller, 2013, p. 608). The Intelligibility in Context Scale was designed to provide a first-phase screening measure of functional intelligibility. It was designed so that speech pathologists can determine whether children who speak languages other than their own require additional assessment. One of the challenges of speech pathologists who work in diversely multilingual countries such as Australia is that there are few screening and assessment tools that are available in languages other than English (Caesar & Kohler, 2007; Jordaan, 2008; Williams & McLeod, 2012). While comprehensive assessments are available in some languages (e.g., Cantonese, German, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Spanish, for a complete list see http://www.csu. edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments), many of these assessments require the speech pathologist to speak that language in order to administer and score the assessment (McLeod & Verdon, 2014). For other languages (e.g., Dari, Fijian, Hmong, Somali, Tongan, isiXhosa, isiZulu), there are few speech pathology assessments or resources. The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children’s Speech (2012) recommended that speech pathologists “generate and share knowledge, resources, and evidence nationally and internationally to facilitate the understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity that will support multilingual children’s speech acquisition and communicative competence” (p. 2). Consequently, speech pathologists from across the world have collaborated to provide the ICS as a free screening tool in 60 languages. Validation and norming of the ICS on English-speaking children The ICS was originally validated on 120 Australian English- speaking preschool-aged children (McLeod, Harrison & McCormack, 2012b). In this study the ICS was found to have high internal reliability, good sensitivity, and construct validity. A positive correlation was found between the children’s scores on the ICS and their percentage of consonants correct on the Diagnostic Evaluation of

KEYWORDS INTELLIGIBILITY MULTILINGUAL SCREENING ASSESSMENT SPEECH SOUND DISORDERS

INVITED PAPER

Sharynne McLeod

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JCPSLP Volume 17, Number 1 2015

www.speechpathologyaustralia.org.au