July 15, 2016

Development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment

The following article has been accepted for publication and forms part of Ben Pham's PhD.

Phạm, B., McLeod, S., & Le, X. T. T. (2016, in press). Development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment. Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology.
Here is the abstract
Vietnamese is the official language of over 92 million people in Viet Nam and nearly four million diaspora including in Australia, US, and Canada. To date, there are no standardized speech assessments for Vietnamese children. This paper outlines the development of the Vietnamese Speech Assessment (Phạm, Le, & McLeod, 2016) through collaboration between researchers in Viet Nam and Australia. The word list contains all Vietnamese consonants, vowels and tones in at least two words with different sequence constraints. Further, the word list was developed to be within the vocabulary range of young children, frequently used by Vietnamese people in different regions, picturable, and either a noun or verb. Picture stimuli were identified and the test was piloted with Vietnamese speakers of different ages who spoke different Vietnamese dialects. A score sheet was designed to include acceptable dialectal pronunciations, and to enable calculation of percentage of consonants/vowels/semivowels/tones correct and presence of phonological processes (patterns). The Vietnamese Speech Assessment is currently undergoing norming and standardization.