Background and Aim: Speech intelligibility is defined as a measure of effectiveness of understanding speech. It has many applications such as nomination of speech disorder intensity. Different methods and speech tasks have been designed for assessment of speech intelligibility amongst which word identification tasks have high validity. This study aimed to provide a test to measure speech intelligibility among children aged 3 to 5 years old.
Methods: Many words were collected and content validity was assessed by 9 speech-language pathologists and 1 linguist. Thirty four words with a content validity above 70% were chosen as the test words and the speech-language pathologists collected suitable pictures for the words. One hundred boys and girls aged 3 to 5 years participated in the study. Inter-rater reliability was administered to assess the test reliability.
Results: An interclass correlation coefficient of 0.85 and spearman correlation coefficient of 0.81 was obtained for the speech intelligibility test.
Conclusion: Speech intelligibility test has appropriate validity and reliability and is suitable for assessment of intelligibility in 3 to 5 years old children.