Comparison of methods in speech acquisition research

The paper examines the effect of choices involved in speech acquisition research among children with impaired hearing. Choices involving transcription method, sampling procedures, subject selection and statistical approaches affect the outcome of any research. Two recent papers used different methodological approaches to examine the conversational speech samples of children with impaired hearing and arrived at differing conclusions about their rates of improvement. To compare these results, a further data set was examined using both methodologies. The analyses indicated a closer alignment of results than was immediately obvious from the two previous studies, suggesting that the different results were primarily due to differences in methodology.