Communication Sampling Examples in Assessment

Communication Sampling Gives us more info to support/negate a standardized test Use of communication skills in real-life situations Most valid assessment of functional communication More naturalistic Effect on daily life

Important aspects of a sampling Representative of daily life opportunities Cultural sensitivity Various conversational situations

Nonverbal Communication Very young Older, but withdrawn or have associated cognitive issues Adults – frustrated, depressed Varies with the develomental level Assist in differential dx (a child with mental dis nonverbal skills should be intact vs child with pdd ACC – pictures (assisted communication device)

Nonverbal sample collection For young children – play sample Ex. Blind child For older clients – going to their site and seeing how they communicate – communicative needs Why do they need to communicate? What do they need to communicate? Long enough to show broad range of communication attempts (around 30 minutes How might a nonverbal person communicate?

Nonverbal – analyzing the sample Does their behavior suggest that they understand language? Joint attention Nonverbal cues How is an act considered communicative? ◦ Directed by eye gaze, body orientation, or gesture ◦ Should have an effective listener ◦ Convey recognizable message that could be translated into words ◦ Persistent – act will be repeated or revised to get a response

Language Sampling Varies per age Assess expression, meaning, and use Preschool (3-5) ◦ Play-based ◦ Open ended questions ◦ ‘shocking’ comments to gain interest – correction (C.V. eval) ◦ minute sample ◦ Pragmatics – difficult (talking to close, to loud, to quiet) School age (5-16) Adult (16-up)

Language Sampling INfo Questions asked ◦ Language compare to other aspects of development ◦ Developmentally appropriate? ◦ Variety ◦ Consistent error patterns Methods used ◦ Computing MLU ◦ Developmental Sentence Analysis ◦ SALT

Language Sampling – school aged Interview (double interview example of pragmatics) Peer vs. adult interaction SALT analysis – more indepth with older kids/adults Complex sentences; bound/free morphemes, conjunctions Pragmatics – topic maintenance; repair of conversation; Narrative/expository eval

Language Sampling with Adults (Acquired Disorders) Interview Picture description of a common scene (Boston Aphasia Battery) Retelling a story Generating a story from pictures Sequencing a common event Analysis involves much of same as with school –aged except more focus on ◦ Empty/vague words; new info errors, inaccurate info; ambiguous or contentless info, inappropriate word use; incpmpleteness

Speech Sampling Artic errors Contents of sound inventory- determine phonetic inventory Intelligibility Fluency (SSI-3) Voice (rainbow passage) = readyg fluency Prosody Resonance