Acoustic characteristics of speech-language pathologists’ productions based on perceived age and language ability of the listener

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) administer assessments to determine whether children have communication disorders. Although these assessments specify procedures to ensure comparable administration across examiners, there are still individual factors that are unaccounted for. A commonly used measure is sentence repetition, in which a child repeats a live-voice production of a sentence. Live-administered sentence repetition tasks can be affected by individual differences in prosody used by the talker, particularly their rate of speech and F0 patterns. In this study, we investigated SLPs’ rate and F0 deviation as they administered a sentence repetition task to an adult and four different hypothetical children: two 3-year-olds and two 12-year-olds who are described as having developmental language disorder (DLD) or not. We conducted an online study in which SLPs produced 16 sentences, which were either taken from the Redmond Sentence Recall (Redmond, 2005) or newly developed syntactically similar sentences. For each production of a child-directed sentence, we measured the rate of speech and F0 deviation and compared those to their adult-directed productions. The results indicate the degree to which individual SLPs adapt their speech for various hypothetical children. A post-survey question suggests differing philosophies on the appropriateness of adapting speech to individual children during assessment administration.