The ultimate goal for speech-language pathologists is to align the linguistic behaviors of the clients whom we serve with those of the ambient language of the community. In light of this goal, it is critical that change in speech production is measured accurately. In this article, we review the use of visual analog scaling as a measure of change in children’s speech production. Following a discussion of this tool, the authors consider the clinical utility of this type of measurement.

This paper examines three methods for providing ratings of within-category detail in children’s productions of /s/ and /ʃ/. A group of listeners (n=61) participated in a rating task in which a forced-choice phoneme identification task was followed by one of three measures of phoneme goodness: visual analog scaling, direct magnitude estimation, or a Likert scale judgment. All three types of ratings were similarly correlated with sounds’ acoustic characteristics. Visual analog scaling and Likert scale judgments had higher intra-rater reliability than did direct magnitude estimation. Moreover, both of them elicited a wider range of judgments than did direct magnitude estimation. Based on our evaluation, Likert scale judgments and visual analog scaling are equally useful tasks for eliciting within-category judgments. Of these two, visual analog scaling may be preferable because it allows for more distinct levels of response.