This article honours Adele Miccio's life work by reflecting on the utility of phonetic transcription. The first section reviews the literature on cases where children whose speech appears to neutralize a contrast in the adult language are found on closer examination to produce a contrast (covert contrast). We present evidence from a new series of perception studies that covert contrast may be far more prevalent in children's speech than existing studies would suggest. The second section presents the results of a new study designed to examine whether naïve listeners' perception of children's /s/ and /θ/ productions can be changed experimentally when they are led to believe that the children who produced the sounds were older or younger. Here, it is shown that, under the right circumstances, adults report more tokens of /θ/ to be accurate productions of /s/ when they believe a talker to be an older child than when they believe the talker to be younger. This finding suggests that auditory information alone cannot be the sole basis for judging the accuracy of a sound. The final section presents recommendations for supplementing phonetic transcription with other measures, to gain a fuller picture of children's production abilities.

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.

Past studies have shown incontrovertible evidence for the existence of covert contrasts in children’s speech, that is, differences between target productions that are nonetheless transcribed with the same phonetic symbol. Moreover, there is evidence that these are relevant to forming prognoses and tracking progress in children with speech sound disorder. A challenge remains to find the most efficient and reliable methods for assessing covert contrasts. This study investigates how readily listeners can identify covert contrasts in children’s speech when using a continuous rating scale in the form of a visual analog scale (VAS) to denote children’s productions. Individual listeners’ VAS responses were found to correlate statistically significantly with a variety of continuous measures of children’s production accuracy, including judgments of binary accuracy pooled over a large set of listeners. These findings reinforce the growing body of evidence that VAS judgments are potentially useful clinical measures of covert contrast.