PHONOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT - A SYSTEMATIC COMPARISON OF CONVERSATION ANDPICTURE NAMING

The purpose of the present study was to systematically compare two met hods of speech elicitation for phonological assessment: conversation a nd picture naming. Subjects were 13 male, phonologically impaired chil dren (aged 4.2 to 5.11 years). All were English speaking and had recei ved no prior speech-language therapy.The children's performance was as sessed on a conversational speech task (CST) and a 162-item picture na ming task (PNT) using three levels of phonological analysis. The CST a nd PNT generally yielded similar sound error patterns, and severity me asures on the two tasks were highly correlated. However, the PNT yield ed more phonological errors. It is suggested that both methods of spee ch elicitation are useful clinical tools for assessment. However, to o btain a thorough sample of a child's speech output, an extensive, well -designed PNT may tap the child's phonological system more deeply, may be more efficient in some cases, and may represent a good index of ph onological ability. (C) 1998 by Elsevier Science Inc.