The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne

Reference Group

Main points

• The reference group consisted of children with 'normal' speech and was not the full range of children for a particular age group.
• The reference group was not a normally distributed group - children with articulation problems were excluded.
• The reference group data are not 'norms'

Children

The reference group consisted of 299 children (148 males & 151 females) in kindergarten to grade 3 from four schools and one kindergarten in adjoining postcode areas in Melbourne's southern suburbs. Ages ranged from 3;5 to 7;11. English was the main language for all the children. All the children were judged to have age-appropriate speech, language and communication skills. Children were excluded on the basis of one or more reports of speech-language problems from their teacher, parents, and/or assessing speech pathologist. Children were also excluded if there was evidence of hearing impairment.

Community

Some community profile characteristics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics data are reported for the area containing the three adjoining postcode suburbs in which the educational facilities were located. The data are compared with Australian national data from the Year Book 2000 (Table 5). The data give a profile of the reference group community which will allow Articulation Survey users to evaluate how applicable the Articulation Survey data might be to their clients.

The greatest differences in the community profile characteristics for the Articulation Survey community and Australia were the higher percentage of two-parent families consisting of tertiary educated, professional/managerial adults and the lower number of working adults in the community. Percentages of Australian-born persons and those with English as the only home language were slightly higher than the national figures.

Data gathering

Data were collected over a 9-month period. Each child was tested by the same speech pathologist using the procedure described in the manual with the following modification:- when a child was given a model of the word (after cueing and prompting had failed to elicit the word), the item was presented again after five or six intervening items. If the child still needed a model, the repeated word was scored as correct or incorrect.

Judging Responses Correct or Incorrect

Items were scored as either correct or incorrect. Incorrect sounds were those where the sound was not the target sound and was either replaced with another sound or omitted. Distorted sounds were decided at the time of testing as either correct or incorrect versions of target sounds. For example, lip-rounded /r/ sounds were judged as incorrect if the distortion was more like another sound /w/ than the target. Dentalised sounds such as /s/, /t/ and /d/ were noted but only scored as incorrect if they were judged as another sound. Children with lateral and interdental sounds were not included in the Reference Group.

Ages and gender of the Reference Group

The 299 children were in five one-year age groups ranging from 3;5 to 7;11 year months. There were no significant differences between the number of boys and girls in each age group nor in the total group (Chi- square).

Table 1: Reference Group numbers in age groups and by gender

Age Group	Boys	Girls	Total
3;6-3;11	15	15	30
4;0-4;11	28	30	58
5;0-5;11	32	37	69
6;0-6;11	41	31	62
7;0-7;11	32	38	70
Total	148	151	299

Gender Differences in Articulation Scores

There were no significant differences (ANOVA) between the number of correct items for boys and girls within each age group. The data for boys and girls were combined.

Age Differences in Articulation Scores

Age differences in the mean scores were not statistically significant (ANOVA). Although the mean scores for single sounds, blends and total score increased with age, the differences between the mean scores across the age groups was small - 8 raw score points for single sounds, 7 points for blends and 16 points for total sounds. The increase in mean scores with age was due to the minimum scores increasing (Figure 1). This was indicated by the standard deviation becoming smaller with increased age. The maximum scores were similar across all age groups. Younger children did better on the Articulation Survey than anticipated. Some children reached the test ceiling at 4;0-4;11 for singles & blends and at 5;0-5;11 for total sounds.

Data not provided

The following data were not obtained: Test-Retest Data, Inter-rater reliability, and how the Articulation Survey performance compared with other measures of Articulation.