SPA 4400 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Specific Language Impairment, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
26 Sep 2020
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Evaluation and Assessment
Chapter 2
General principles of assessment for suspected developmental language disorder
• Intro
o Naturalist:
▪ DLD = an impairment / disease process within the individual that disrupts
functioning
▪ Clinician would collect data from variety of sources to describe the clients
condition
o Normative:
▪ DLD = societal expactations and obstacles to meeting those expectations
▪ Idneitfication of the problem and its cause are less important than
understanding how the impairment influences social and behavoiral
outcomes for the child
o In practice being together normative & naturalist
o Goal of assessment:
▪ To decide whether the child has a significant impairment in language
form, content and use
▪ Describe that deficit
▪ Determine how the deifict will affect the child’s daily activity
o Can think of assessment as hypothesis testing
• Assessing communicative functioning
o Functional sequalae’s of any impairments + physical structures involved in
communication
o Key outcome of assessment =
▪ An understanding and description of how an individuals strength and
weaknesses affect their level of adaptation to everyday living
o WHO’s guidelines provide a framework for describing individuals health in
relation to what they can do in a standard environment and their actual
environment
o Assessment plan should:
▪ Yield information relevant to standard & actual environment
• Multidisciplinary assessment
o SLP almost never comes to assessment conclusions in isolation
▪ Putting information together from many people provides an holistic
piture of child’s ability
Beginning the assessment process: referral, case review, observation
• Collect referral information
o Clinician needs to determine what information is already in the file and what
needs to be learned during assessment
▪ What is underlying problem? Medical terms? What other professionals
see the child?
