Multilingual Children's Speech
The Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Languages (SACHL, Margetson & McLeod, 2025), is a collaborative assessment approach where speech-language pathologists (SLPs) draw on the expertise of multilingual families and interpreters in their knowledge of their home language.
In partnership with families and interpreters, SLPs determine whether children are experiencing speech difficulties in all the languages that they speak, and decide together whether multilingual children would benefit from intervention. By implementing the SACHL, it is envisaged that: (a) SLPs will be equipped with decision-making skills for considering the difference between children who are typical language learners and children who have speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN), particularly speech sound disorder (SSD) and (b) that multilingual children may be less likely to be under- or over-diagnosed and more likely to receive appropriate communication support.
Step 1. Consider your own cultural responsivity and linguistic knowledge.
Step 2. Learn about the child’s home language(s) and dialect(s).
Step 3. Make a plan for speech transcription in each language.
Step 4. Select a single word speech assessment tool in each language.
Step 5. Identify an assessment partner you can collaborate with who speaks the child’s home language.
Step 6. Discuss similarities and differences in phonology between the languages.
Step 7. Collaborate to plan how the speech assessment will be conducted.
Step 8. Ask the family member to say the assessment target words (and audio or video record).
Step 9. Conduct case history, language history profiles, language, hearing and oro-motor assessment.
Step 10. Administer the child’s speech assessment in the society language (e.g., English).
Step 11. Check whether the child used non-shared consonants from the home language during the society language (e.g., English) assessment.
Step 12. Ask the assessment partner to administer the child’s home language speech assessment.
Step 13. After the home language speech assessment check immediately with the assessment partner whether they heard any consonant mismatches.
Step 14. Administer further assessment as indicated.
Step 15. Listen to the recordings, check the online transcription, and compare the child’s productions to the target adult’s productions.
Step 16. Consider possible reasons for each of the child’s mismatches.
Step 17. Note similarities and differences in the child’s productions across languages.
Step 18. Analyse the speech samples in each language to form a description of the child’s entire phonological repertoire.
Step 19. Use a converging evidence approach and criterion-referenced measures across languages for differential diagnosis.
Step 20. Share assessment findings with the family (strengths and concerns) and plan next steps.
Margetson, K., & McLeod, S. (2025). Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL): A clinical protocol. In S. McLeod (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of speech development in languages of the world. Oxford University Press.
Coming soon: SACHL workbooks for different languages
Margetson, K., McLeod, S., Verdon, S., & Tran, V. H. (2023). Transcribing multilingual children’s and adults’ speech. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 37 (4-6), 415-435. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699206.2022.2051073
Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2023). Cross-linguistic transfer and ambient phonology: Impact on diagnosis of speech sound disorders in a longitudinal bilingual case study. Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech, 4(3), 311-339. https://doi.org/10.1558/jmbs.23672
Margetson, K., McLeod, S., & Verdon, S. (2024). Diagnosing speech sound disorder in bilingual Vietnamese-English–speaking children: Are English-only assessments sufficient? In E. Babatsouli (Ed.), Multilingual acquisition and learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity (pp. 217-245). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Margetson, K., & McLeod, S. (2024). Speech Assessment of Children’s Home Language(s) (SACHL). Charles Sturt University. https://www.csu.edu.au/research/multilingual-speech/speech-assessments/sachl