Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1111/1460-6984.70132

Publication Title

International Journal of Language Communication Disorders

Volume

60

Issue

6

Pages

e70132

Abstract

Introduction

Running speech sampling is an essential component of a paediatric voice evaluation, in that it should provide the examiner with a representative vocal sample of the child's everyday voice use outside of the clinic setting. Current speech sampling practices, consisting of reading tasks, informal conversation sampling and the voice question ('Tell me about your voice problem'), may not elicit consistent samples or samples of sufficient length to allow the examiner to make a reliable and valid judgement about vocal quality. The aim of this study is to compare the voice quality of children produced in response to existing running speech sampling methods and narrative elicitation tasks commonly used in language sampling activities, which are hypothesized to elicit longer units of connected speech.

Methods

Fifty-three children participated in the following tasks: prolonged vowels /a/ and /i/, the CAPE-V sentences. The reference standard running speech sampling tasks were: the voice question, an informal conversation sample and the Rainbow Passage. The comparison running speech sampling tasks were: My First Day, the Bus Story Test and the Test of Narrative Language-2. All tasks were audio-recorded. The voice samples were independently rated by two trained speech-language pathologists using the CAPE-V instrument. Inter-rater reliability was acceptable for all perceptual tasks (ICC 0.901-1.00). CAPE-V ratings were considered the primary comparison measure; smoothed cepstral peak prominence was considered a secondary comparison measure. Diagnostic indicators, sensitivity, specificity and positive and negative predictive values were calculated in order to evaluate the levels of diagnostic decision-making of the comparison tasks compared to the existing reference standard tasks.

Results

On perceptual analysis, weak to strong correlations (r = 0.291-0.697) were observed between reference tasks, and weak to very strong correlations between reference and comparison tasks (r = 0.200-0.747). When diagnostic utility was compared, one or more indicators were at an acceptable level between the conversation sample and the narrative tasks, and the voice question and three out of four narrative tasks.

Conclusions

A narrative elicitation procedure, such as a re-tell or story generation task, may be suitable for eliciting a running speech sample in paediatric voice evaluations. Both the acoustic properties of the vocal signal and the perceptual properties of the voice, when compared between conversational speech and the narrative tasks, are correlated and lead to similar diagnostic decisions, as evidenced by acceptable values on the diagnostic indicators calculated in this study.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Data Availability

Article states: "De-identified data can be made available from the first author, on request."

Original Publication Citation

Reynolds, V., Scavo-Smith, K., Oteng-Bediako, K., & Scanlon, S. (2025). An observational study of discourse tasks and running speech sampling in the assessment of paediatric voice quality. International Journal of Language Communication Disorders, 60(6), 1-12, Article e70132. https://doi.org/10.1111/1460-6984.70132

ORCID

0000-0003-1332-1471 (Reynolds)

Additional Files
jlcd70132-sup-0001-strobe-discourse.docx (32 kB)
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