Factors affecting judgment accuracy when scoring children's responses to non-word repetition stimuli in real time.

What is already known on this subject Children and patients with a wide range of cognitive and language difficulties are less accurate relative to controls when they attempt to repeat non-words. Responses to non-words are often scored as correct or incorrect at the time the test is conducted. Limited assessments of this scoring procedure have been conducted to date. What this study adds to the existing knowledge Live NWR scores made by 146 children were available and the accuracy of these judgements was assessed here against ones based on phonemic transcriptions. Signal detection analyses showed that live scoring missed consonant errors in children's responses. Further analyses, using linear mixed effect models, showed that live judgments led to consonant substitution, deletion and insertion errors. What are the practical and clinical implications of this work? Improved and practicable NWR scoring procedures are required to provide SaLTs with better indications about children's language development (typical and atypical) and for clinical assessments of older people. The procedures currently used miss substitutions, deletions and insertions. Hence, procedures are required that provide the information currently only available when materials are transcribed manually. The possibility of training automatic speech recognizers to provide this level of detail is raised.