An analysis of ‘live’ transcriptions of children's unintelligible speech revealed low agreement on phonetic detail even between experienced transcribers. In addition, especially on complex items, agreement often did not reflect the child's production but rather the transcribers' ‘normalisation’ of what they had heard. A group of experienced transcribers who were allowed to listen to high‐quality tapes as often as they found necessary reached 95–97% agreement on phonetic detail, provided they could discuss discrepancies, in exceptional cases with the help of a spectrogram. Transcriptions obtained in this way are reliable representations of the speech of unintelligible children and allow differentiation between purely phonological disorders and other disorders of speech production.
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Amorosa et al. (1985) studied this question.
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