The SibSpeak Assessment

You can click on this link to download a SibSpeak Information Sheet which will give you more detailed information about the project.

Taking part in SibSpeak involves allowing a researcher to visit you and your child at home. There will be one assessment session lasting about one hour when your child is 9-18 months of age, and then two sessions of around one hour at about the time that your child turns two.

The SibSpeak assessment is play based and involves observing how the child interacts with different toys, and with the parent and the researcher. The parent is asked to play with the child using a particular set of toys for about ten minutes, while the researcher observes. The researcher will then join the play and introduce some simple activities to assess the child’s communication in a play-based way. All SibSpeak assessments are video recorded so the data can be analysed later. The videos are only seen by people working on the project unless you give consent for them to be used in presentations and teaching.

Parents who take part in SibSpeak are also asked to fill in a set of questionnaires about their children. This should take less than an hour. Questionnaires will ask mainly about the development of the baby taking part in the study, but will also include questions about the communication skills of any older children in the family.

The babies who have taken part in the pilot phase of SibSpeak have seemed to enjoy the activities, and parents have stated how interesting it is to analyse their children’s communication.

If you would like to take part in SibSpeak, you can sign up by contacting helen.cain.1@city.ac.uk or filling in the form on our Contact Us tab. Please also feel free to email us or use the Contact Us tab if you have any questions about the research.