Abstract

Introduction: In Slovenia, as part of the health program of preventive examinations for children and adolescents, a preventive speech therapy examination is also provided for when the child is five years old. With this examination, we determine whether the child deviates in the area of speech and language development. If a deviation is detected, the child‘s parents are advised to continue speech therapy treatments. The success of the mentioned treatments depends on how the parents subjectively assess the child‘s understanding and whether they are aware of the presence of speech and language problems Material, subjects and methods: 64 monolingual children between the ages of 4 and 5 were included in the research, who attended a preventive speech therapy examination at the Nova Gorica Health Center between October 2022 and June 2023. The child‘s speech was recorded and transcribed, and the parents completed the Intelligibility in Context Scale (ICS) (1) and answered two additional questions. Purpose and results: The purpose is to show the importance of the connection between the subjective and objective assessment of the child’s speech. A low but positive correlation was found between the measure of comprehensibility and the subjective assessment of the parents (Pearson coefficient 0.352). Conclusion: Based on the results obtained, parents of children in the preschool period should be made even better aware of the importance of the intelligibility of the child’s speech and the possible presence of speech-language problems.

Key words: speech intelligibility, subjective assessment of parents, prevention