Transcription of Vietnamese adults' and children's consonants by English-speaking speech-language pathologists

Objective: To examine English-speaking speech-language pathologists’ (SLPs) transcription of consonants in Vietnamese words and identification of correct/incorrect productions of Vietnamese children’s speech. Participants and Methods: Twenty English-speaking SLPs completed three tasks. Task 1: transcription of 22 English words using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Task 2: transcription of 47 words spoken by Vietnamese adults. Task 3: transcription of 94 Vietnamese words spoken by Vietnamese children and identification of correct/incorrect productions. Participants completed questionnaires exploring language proficiency, transcription skill, musicality and confidence with multilingual clients. Results: Task 1: participants demonstrated good accuracy transcribing English words (M = 97.2%). Task 2: an average of 52.9% consonants were transcribed correctly (89.4% when Vietnamese-English common transcription errors were considered). Common transcription errors included voicing of plosives, place and syllable-final omission. Accuracy was higher on shared English and Vietnamese consonantal articulations (e.g., /b/ and /m/). Task 3: on average, SLPs correctly identified accuracy of 73.8% of Vietnamese children’s productions and transcribed 69.2% consonants correctly (83.8% when Vietnamese-English common transcription errors were considered). Musicality was correlated with SLPs’ accuracy of transcription. Conclusion: English-speaking SLPs have some skills transcribing Vietnamese adults and transcribing and identifying correct/incorrect productions of children’s speech. SLPs may use knowledge of common transcription errors to support understanding of their transcription of speech

The adaptation of MAIN to Vietnamese

This paper describes the revision of the Vietnamese version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first introduce the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese-speaking populations after which we describe the translation and adaptation process of the Vietnamese MAIN and present results from monolingual and bilingual children