Agreements between speech language pathologists and naïve listeners’ judgements of intelligibility in children with cleft palate

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in interdisciplinary craniofacial teams need to know how much their judgments of speech intelligibility could predict the patient’s communication difficulties with non-clinical communicative partners. This study examines the relationship between experienced SLPs and naïve listeners in judgments of speech intelligibility in speakers with cleft palate. A speech perception study was conducted using speech samples from 20 speakers with velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) following cleft palate. Speech samples were presented to 70 naïve listeners and 10 SLPs who were experts in cleft palate treatment. Speech intelligibility scores from naïve listeners’ orthographic transcriptions were obtained as the percentage of correctly identified words. Speech intelligibility scores from SLPs were obtained using a five-point rating scale. Spearman rank correlation indicated a very high level of overall agreement between naïve listeners and SLPs at the speaker level scores (r_s  = −.94, p <.001). While the listeners’ judgment seems highly related across highly intelligible speakers, the differences in agreements increase when the speaker is unintelligible. The high correlations between scores for naïve listeners and SLPs suggest that speech intelligibility in children with VPI could be predicted by ratings done in the clinic by expert SLPs.