Assessment of Speech Sound Production by Story-retelling in Persian Speaking Children: Introducing a New Instrument

BACKGROUND: Speech and language pathologists should include connected speech assessment as part of their evaluation for children with speech sound disorders. The purpose of the present study was to design and validate an instrument for assessment of articulation by story-retelling for Persian children. METHODS: 261 typically developing children, aged 4-5 years old in Iran, Tehran, in 2016-2017, were recruited in the current study. First, two stories were designed. Next, the expert panel reviewed those two stories and selected one story for assessment. The strengths of the test for discriminating between the two age groups (48-54 months and 55-60 months) and between boys and girls were investigated for construct validity. Test-retest was performed for 15 children. Also, inter-rater reliability was evaluated via calculating the correlation between the two examiners’ scores. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), version 24, was used for statistical analysis. The significance level was set at (P<0.05). RESULTS: There was 80% or more agreement in experts’ response to questions regarding content validity. All of the reliability values were higher than 0.85. No significant difference was observed between boys and girls (P=0.77), but there was a significant difference between the two age groups (P<0.001). There was a significant correlation between this test and phonetic test of the Persian version of diagnostic articulation and phonology (r=0.62, P=0.002). CONCLUSION: The Persian story for the assessment of speech sound production is a reliable and valid instrument that can be used to evaluate the articulation of Persian children.