Fuchs, D., Fuchs, L. S., Garwick, D. R., & Featherstone, N. (1983). Test performance of language-handicapped children with familiar and unfamiliar examiners . The Journal of Psychology , 114 (1), 37–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1983.9915393

Participants were assessed twice during a period of two weeks-once by a classroom teacher and once by a stranger-within a crossover design. All examiners were female, certified, and had several years of experience.

Participants included 34 preschool children, 21 boys and 13 girls, with moderate to profound disabilities in speech or language functioning. The mean age was 4-9. All children performed within the normal range on IQ tests.

Subjects completed two tasks from the Sounds-in-Words subtest of the Test of Articulation (Goldman & Fristoe, 1972): a labeling response task and an imitative response task. The subjects' production of initial-, medial-, and final-position phonemes was analyzed. The third task required subjects to describe two pictures from Tester's Teaching Picture Series (1966).

Subjects employed a greater number of intelligible words on the description task when tested by familiar than by unfamiliar examiners. Subjects did not perform differentially on the labeling or imitative tasks.