Informal Eval - 9/7

what is informal evaluation? what does it assess?

flexible evaluation that does not involve standardized tests, but clinical judgement. it assesses a patient’s real-world communication abilities without strict scoring rules

what is the first step of the aphasia tree diagram?

assessing fluency

what is fluency?

smoothness, rate, and effort involved in speech

what does it mean for someone to have a fluent aphasia?

the person can speak smoothly with normal sentence structure, but what they say lacks meaning, makes no sense, and includes jargon

• relatively normal prosodic variations of pitch, loudness, and stress

• words flow in a manner that sounds fairly normal

• may be empty speech or jargon

what does it mean for someone to have a nonfluent aphasia?

speaking takes the person a lot of effort, is hesitant and slow, telegraphic-like speech, long pauses, but the words they say tend to make more sense

• effortful, hesitant speech

• single words and short phrases

• limited use of functor words such as “is” and “the”

• telegraphic speech

what are ways that fluency is assessed?

• listen to their speech → ask them open ended questions, eg. “why are you here today?”

  • which words are they using?

  • what kind of errors do they make?

  • is it effortful, hesitant, telegraphic?

• have them describe a procedure → how do you make a PB&J?

• have them describe a picture (telling a story)

  • cookie theft picture

  • family picture in room

what is the second step of the aphasia tree diagram?

assessing auditory comprehension

what is auditory comprehension? what does it mean for someone to have good or poor auditory comprehension?

how the brain decodes and makes meaning out of sounds and words heard through the ears → how someone understands spoken language

how is auditory comprehension assessed?

• word comprehension → word-picture matching

• sentence comprehension → who is doing what to whom?

  • match a sentence to a picture

  • follow instructions for manipulating toys or tokens

  • answer questions (must require minimal expressive abilities, pointing, etc)

  • verify the truth of a sentence relative to a picture

  • sentence/picture matching → testing reversible passives!

• yes/no questions → “do you butter toast with a comb?”

• following commands (one, two, or three part) → clap your hands, then touch your knees. they must wait until all directions have been given

what are reversible passives?

a sentence where both nouns are equally capable of initiating the action, eg. the girl was kissed by the boy (more difficult for patients with aphasia)

what is the third step of the aphasia tree diagram?

assessing repetition

how do you assess the repetition abilities of a patient with aphasia?

just have them repeat a word/phrase back to you. increase syllabic complexity. eg. cap, piano, personal computer, she is not very happy, recreational motorcycle.

what is the worst kind of aphasia? what is its fluency, auditory comprehension, and repetition?

global: fluent, poor aud comp, poor repetition

how do you assess naming/word retrieval?

• object/picture naming, “confrontation naming”

• naming to definition (auditory modality)

• naming pictures or verbs

aphasia that is characterized by severe disruption in all language functions is called ____ aphasia

global