An Observational Study of Discourse Tasks and Running Speech Sampling in the Assessment of Paediatric Voice Quality

What is already known on this subject Perceptual evaluation of voice quality poses challenges, particularly in the paediatric population. A running speech sample is an essential component in order to provide a representative sample of an individual's voice quality outside the clinic setting. Current sampling practices are non-standardized and may not be appropriate for all children, especially those with reading and/or language difficulties. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study presents data comparing the voice quality of children, elicited using current reference standard tasks and narrative sampling tasks. Such tasks are more commonly used in the evaluation of language abilities, but could illustrate a way in which a clinician could elicit a sufficiently long, ecologically valid, running speech sample for perceptual voice evaluation. In addition, the sample could be analysed as a screener of language skills. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? While this study could be considered exploratory, it is possible that using narrative elicitation techniques in paediatric voice evaluations could yield sufficiently long units of speech that are representative of a child's everyday speaking voice. Such practices would add valuable information regarding language skills to the evaluation process.