ASLP 5825 Comprehensive Assessment Components

Phonemic Level

Phonemes are the central units; underlying phonological representation

Phonetic Level

Sounds are the central units; physical productions with acoustic properties that can be objectively measured

Case History

Parent interviews; any and all background information about the client

Intelligibility 

The degree to which the listener understands what the speaker says when the target is uncertain; single most practice measure of communicative competence; rating scales, single word measures, connected speech measures 

Oral Structure

Oral mech exam; DDK; Max phonation time

Assessment of Speech Production — Consonants

The most common and fundamental aspect of all speech assessments; word position impacts production and accuracy and consistency.

Assessment of Speech Production — Consonant Clusters

Take extended time to master; intervention targets because they contribute greatly to intelligibility

Assessment of Speech Production — Vowels and Dipthongs

issued because __ errors in monosyllables found in children with severe SSD, CAS, dysarthria, and undetected hearing loss.

Assessment of Speech Production — Polysyllables

3+ syllable words; many assessments contain very few of these and risk underestimating the severity of SSD

Assessment of Speech Production — Prosody

The melody of language; not a problematic area for children with developmental language disorder and dyslexia

Assessment of Speech Production — Tone

Only applicable for tone languages (such as Cantonese)

Assessment of Variability and Inconsistency: Child produces the SAME sound DIFFERENTLY depending on the word it appears in

Not as concerning

Assessment of Variability and Inconsistency: Child produces a DIFFERENT pronunciation of a sound in the SAME word

More concerning: child may have difficulties with speech motor planning/programming, phonological planning, sequencing sounds consistently, etc.

Speech Perception and Hearing — Auditory Discrimination

Can the child detect differences between sounds or words? ABX tasks (each trial contains three separate syllables, which is different?); “is the word possible in the language you are learning?”; same or different tasks

Speech Perception and Hearing — Auditory Lexical Discrimination (pictures involved)

Measuring the child’s ability to compare what the hear with their own representations of words; contrastive minimal pairs: present pictures that use the child’s error targets sounds as minimal contrasts by presenting pictures

Speech Perception and Hearing — Picture Identification Task 

Child listens to a spoken word and must identify the corresponding picture from a set of visual options; used to determine whether a child can understand and discriminate words that differ by a single sound (minimal pairs) without relying on their ability to speak 

Phonological Processing Assessment — Phonological Access

The ability to retrieve phonological information quickly from long-term memory; measured through RAN

Phonological Processing Assessment — Phonological Awareness

The conscious awareness of the sound structure of spoken language; measured through word, syllable, rhyme, phoneme (phoneme identification, phoneme deletion, substitution, word segmentation, odd one out) 

Phonological Processing Assessment — Phonological Memory

The ability to temporarily store and manipulate sound-based information; measured through nonword repetition tasks