Language assessment of children is an essential task of the speech clinician and many studies have been concerned with the validity of the data gathered. Few studies, however, have investigated examiner variability as a possible source of deviation in language assessment. This study was designed to evaluate and compare the amount of verbal output which children with normal language use when examined by two different examiners when the examiners are in their most comfortable setting. Six children, four years of age, were examined by a speech pathologist in the clinic and the mother in the home and the 12 fifteen-minute taped episodes of dialogue were transcribed and subjected to mean length of response analysis by the Wilcoxon Matched-Pair Signed-Rank test of significance. Results indicate there is no statistical significance at the .05 level of confidence to the differences between results obtained by the examiners nor to the differences in results obtained between the first and second examination. The average MLR achieved by the subjects in this study does not reach those of previously established norms. A trend was evidenced for the speech pathologist to elicit greater amount of verbal output than the mothers and both the statistical non-significance of differences and the failure to reach previous norms may be an artifact due to the small sample size, method of recording, and examiner variability.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pdx.edu/oai:pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu:open_access_etds-1792 |
| Date | 01 August 1970 |
| Creators | Mathis, Joan |
| Publisher | PDXScholar |
| Source Sets | Portland State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Dissertations and Theses |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds