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Teachers' Perceptions of Students With Speech Sound Disorders: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis

Contact author: Megan S. Overby, 209 Lally, The College of St. Rose, 432 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12203. E-mail: overbym{at}strose.edu.

Purpose: This study examined 2nd-grade teachers' perceptions of the academic, social, and behavioral competence of students with speech sound disorders (SSDs).

Method: Forty-eight 2nd-grade teachers listened to 2 groups of sentences differing by intelligibility and pitch but spoken by a single 2nd grader. For each sentence group, teachers rated the speaker's academic, social, and behavioral competence using an adapted version of the Teacher Rating Scale of the Self-Perception Profile for Children (S. Harter, 1985) and completed 3 open-ended questions. The matched-guise design controlled for confounding speaker and stimuli variables that were inherent in prior studies.

Results: Statistically significant differences in teachers' expectations of children's academic, social, and behavioral performances were found between moderately intelligible and normal intelligibility speech. Teachers associated moderately intelligible low-pitched speech with more behavior problems than moderately intelligible high-pitched speech or either pitch with normal intelligibility. One third of the teachers reported that they could not accurately predict a child's school performance based on the child's speech skills, one third of the teachers causally related school difficulty to SSD, and one third of the teachers made no comment.

Conclusion: Intelligibility and speaker pitch appear to be speech variables that influence teachers' perceptions of children's school performance.

KEY WORDS: literacy, intelligibility, school-age children, speech disorder

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