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A Performance Curve for Assessing Change in Percentage of Consonants Correct–Revised (PCC-R)

Janine E. Janosky
University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

P. David Adelson
University of Pittsburgh and Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh

Contact author: Thomas F. Campbell, Callier Center for Communication Disorders, University of Texas at Dallas, 1966 Inwood Road, Dallas, TX 75235. E-mail: thomas.f.campbell{at}utdallas.edu.

Purpose: Interpreting the rapidly changing speech skills of young children recovering from neurological injury is difficult because developmental expectations are generally available only at relatively lengthy intervals (e.g., 6 or 12 months). In this research note, the authors describe the process of generating a Percentage of Consonants Correct–Revised (PCC-R; L. D. Shriberg, D. Austin, B. A. Lewis, J. L. McSweeny, & D. L. Wilson, 1997a) performance curve and illustrate some of its applications for assessing change in performance over time.

Method: The authors compiled mean PCC-R scores from 16 samples of typically developing children (18–172 months) and used curve fitting to test more than 11,000 statistical models of monthly growth in PCC-R. They selected a parsimonious and developmentally plausible model with R² = .9839 (p < .0005) and used it to generate the PCC-R, standard deviation, and standard error expected at each monthly age.

Results: The PCC-R performance curve distinguished among 65 children (37–57 months of age) diagnosed independently with normal or disordered speech with a high degree of success. More important, the PCC-R performance curve can be used to identify the points at which children (18–172 months) recovering from neurological injury achieve normal-range consonant production.

Conclusion: The curve-fitting approach holds promise as a means of interpreting temporal variations in speech production at a finer grain than existing normative data currently allow.

KEY WORDS: growth curve analysis, speech recovery, pediatric brain injury