Comparison of Speech Intelligibility in the Expression of Words and Sentences in Persian-Speaking Children in Ghaemshahr City

In children's speech disorders, assessing the percentage index of speech intelligibility is important. Expression of single words and sentences in some ways, such as the effect of voices on eachother, is different, that may affect speech intelligibility. In the present study, attempts were made to answer the question whether the percentages of speech intelligibility are different in these two tests.

In the present cross-sectional study, 120 healthy children (60 girls and 60 boys) were chosen among all kindergartens in Ghaemshahr city, Iran. Children's speech samples were collected by means of calling pictures and repeating sentences. The voices were tape-recorded and children's speech intelligibility was studied in four age groups within six months. Comparison of the intelligibility of the two speech samples was carried out using Wilcoxon Tests and the correlation between children’s scores in the expression of words and sentences was determined using Spearman correlation.

The mean score of the speech intelligibility was 94% (SD=10.66) in the words test and 96/02% (SD=9.65) in the sentence test. A significant difference was observed between age groups in both tests (α =0/05). Also, there was a significant correlation between the intelligibility of words and sentences (p=0.000). However, no statistically significant difference was found between boys and girls.

The significant difference found in the speech intelligibility percentages of words and sentence test shows that language and communication factors affecting the listener's understanding of other's speech are different. So, in measuring the speech intelligibility using these two tests, we should not expect similar results. Increase in the speech intelligibility percentage in sentence test may be due to the abundance of semantic clues, which can increase the listener's guessing capability.