Abstract
Purpose: There has been increased interest in using telepractice for involving more diverse children in research and clinical services, as well as when in-person assessment is challenging, such as during COVID-19. Little is known, however, about the feasibility, reliability, and validity of language samples when conducted via telepractice. Method: Child language samples from parent–child play were recorded either in person in the laboratory or via video chat at home, using parents’ preferred commercially available software on their own device. Samples were transcribed and analyzed using Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts software. Analyses compared measures between-subjects for 46 dyads who completed video chat language samples versus 16 who completed in-person samples; within-subjects analyses were conducted for a subset of 13 dyads who completed both types. Groups did not differ significantly on child age, sex, or socioeconomic status. Results: The number of usable samples and percent of utterances with intelligible audio signal did not differ significantly for in-person versus video chat language samples. Child speech and language characteristics (including mean length of utterance, type–token ratio, number of different words, grammatical errors/omissions, and child speech intelligibility) did not differ significantly between in-person and video chat methods. This was the case for between-group analyses and within-child comparisons. Furthermore, transcription reliability (conducted on a subset of samples) was high and did not differ between in-person and video chat methods. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that child language samples collected via video chat are largely comparable to in-person samples in terms of key speech and language measures. Best practices for maximizing data quality for using video chat language samples are provided.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 3982-3990 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research |
| Volume | 63 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2020 |
Funding
This work was funded by a grant from the Delaney Fund for Research in Communication (School of Communication, Northwestern University) to PI Norton and by support from the Undergraduate Research Grant Program, which is administered by Northwestern University’s Office of Undergraduate Research. The conclusions, opinions, and other statements in this publication are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. We acknowledge these contributors to this research: Katie Gottfred, John Lybolt, Nina Smith, Josh Holton, Ryan Gunn, Emma Baime, Camille Nuttall, Biya Ahmed, Maggie Boland, Shradha Mehta, Jade Mitchell, Skylar Ozoh, Cadence Reed-Bippen, Kiera Cook, Sean McWeeny, and Silvia Clement-Lam. We thank Pamela Hadley for her suggestions on the paper. We thank the participating families for their time. This work was funded by a grant from the Delaney Fund for Research in Communication (School of Communication, Northwestern University) to PI Norton and by support from the Undergraduate Research Grant Program, which is administered by Northwestern University’s Office of Undergraduate Research. The conclusions, opinions, and other statements in this publication are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language
- Speech and Hearing