Development of The Viking Speech Scale to classify the speech of children with cerebral palsy.
The Viking Speech Scale is a quick, trustworthy way to grade speech clarity in kids with CP and works from either live observation or chart review.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a five-level speech scale for kids with cerebral palsy.
They tested the children across three regions in the U.K.
Two speech therapists, one teacher, and one parent each rated the same child twice, once live and once from notes.
What they found
Agreement between raters was moderate to almost perfect (kappa 0.65-0.92).
Scores stayed the same when kids were re-checked four weeks later.
Parents and pros both said the scale took less than five minutes and was "easy."
The scale worked equally well from a quick clinic visit or old chart notes.
How this fits with other research
Jantakat et al. (2015) did the same kind of check on balance, not speech. They showed the Berg and Pediatric Balance Scales also give steady scores across raters and across GMFCS levels. Together the two papers build a playbook: pick a body system, build a short scale, test inter-rater reliability, and you’re done.
Kaiser et al. (2022) tried the same idea with the SDQ for behavior. Their parent version held up, but teacher and self-report versions did not. The Viking Speech Scale wins here because every informant route—therapist, teacher, parent—passed the reliability cut.
Cymbal et al. (2020) later pushed the same idea into adult services with the PDC-HS. Like Lindsay, they found high test-retest numbers when trained staff did the rating. The pattern shows brief, domain-specific checklists can travel across ages and settings if you keep the wording concrete and the training short.
Why it matters
You now have a one-page tool that tells you, in plain English, how clear a child’s speech is and what level of AAC backup you might need. No extra gear, no long protocol. Drop it into your intake packet, hand it to the parent while they wait, and you have a reliable baseline before the first session starts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Surveillance registers monitor the prevalence of cerebral palsy and the severity of resulting impairments across time and place. The motor disorders of cerebral palsy can affect children's speech production and limit their intelligibility. We describe the development of a scale to classify children's speech performance for use in cerebral palsy surveillance registers, and its reliability across raters and across time. Speech and language therapists, other healthcare professionals and parents classified the speech of 139 children with cerebral palsy (85 boys, 54 girls; mean age 6.03 years, SD 1.09) from observation and previous knowledge of the children. Another group of health professionals rated children's speech from information in their medical notes. With the exception of parents, raters reclassified children's speech at least four weeks after their initial classification. Raters were asked to rate how easy the scale was to use and how well the scale described the child's speech production using Likert scales. Inter-rater reliability was moderate to substantial (k>.58 for all comparisons). Test-retest reliability was substantial to almost perfect for all groups (k>.68). Over 74% of raters found the scale easy or very easy to use; 66% of parents and over 70% of health care professionals judged the scale to describe children's speech well or very well. We conclude that the Viking Speech Scale is a reliable tool to describe the speech performance of children with cerebral palsy, which can be applied through direct observation of children or through case note review.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.06.035