Impacts of seeing bilingual children (Potratz, 2025)

<p dir="ltr"><b>Purpose:</b> Overall, seeing a speaker results in higher intelligibility than hearing speech alone because of visual speech cues. Intelligibility ratings of conversational speech samples provided by school-age bilingual children in two presentation modalities (i.e., audio only and audiovisual [AV]) were examined to determine whether there were other impacts of seeing the children.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Method: </b>Forty speech-language pathologists (SLPs) rated the intelligibility of conversational speech samples provided by 23 typically developing school-age children in three groups: bilingual Spanish–English, bilingual Mam–English (Mam is an Indigenous, Mayan language spoken in Guatemala), and monolingual English (control). In an online experiment, SLPs heard audio-only and AV recordings of individual 2-min speech samples in a randomized order. Data were analyzed using a linear mixed-effects model to determine if there were effects of presentation modality, speaker group, or accentedness on the intelligibility ratings.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results:</b> No statistical differences were found between intelligibility ratings from the audio-only and AV presentation modalities. Accentedness was a significant factor on intelligibility ratings, whereas speaker group was not.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions: </b>SLPs rated conversational speech samples of bilingual and monolingual English-speaking children as having similar intelligibility, regardless of whether they listened to audio-only or AV recordings, even though visual speech cues should have caused a difference. Clinically, when SLPs use intelligibility ratings in their assessments of bilingual children’s speech for speech sound disorders, it is vital to consider the influences of nonnative accent and linguistic bias.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Intelligibility rating means and standard deviations for speakers by group and modality.</p><p dir="ltr">Potratz, J. R. (2025). Impacts of seeing bilingual children on intelligibility ratings. <i>Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups</i>. Advance online publication. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_PERSP-25-00043" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_PERSP-25-00043</a></p>