Latest Blog Posts

May 26 - 31: Communication Disorders in Adults A Family Story My perfectly healthy, happy, and extremely social mother of 85 years recently hurt her knee. The pain became excruciating and the family was called into action for doctor appointments and subsequent in-home care. In order to heal, she needed to stay off her feet and was limited to sitting in chairs and bed rest. During her recovery ...

Guest authors: Lori Vaughn & Janna B. Oetting, Louisiana State University  Janna: Welcome to the Ph.D. program Lori. You need to learn SALT. Lori: My head is about to explode from everything in this Ph.D. program! Janna: You will find that you can’t live without SALT. Lori: They tried to teach me SALT in graduate school. Janna: Now is the perfect time to master SALT. As part of your f...

Dr. Kimbrough Oller Professor and Plough Chair of Excellence The University of Memphis School of Communication Sciences and Disorders The technology produced by the LENA Foundation for all-day recording in the home with a battery-powered device worn in infants' and children's clothing has added a major new method to the study of the acquisition of language. There has been a great deal of emph...

So there is this odd thing that happens once in a while when you are using SALT: a measure comes back with a seemingly nonsensical standard deviation (SD) value. We’ve seen them come in as low as 21 SDs below the mean. And it’s not a mistake. Why does this happen? Is there anything valuable you can learn from this result? How can you report this result (for example on an IEP report) in a meanin...

Hopefully you already know that language sample analysis can be used to analyze the speech and language of special populations, such as clients with Down syndrome (DS). But you might be wondering just exactly how well it works and how valid the SALT analysis can be. Well, SALT and associated researchers spent about a decade looking at that question. And as an added bonus, that research has give...

Is LSA using SALT a standardized assessment? No. But we think you should be taking language samples anyway. We frequently hear from SLPs that they can’t - or don’t - use LSA because it’s not standardized. We recognize that standardized tests are a necessary part of the process for qualifying students for services. We also recognize the debate over the use of standardized tests to make substanti...

 Why don’t you use language sample analysis in your practice? “It takes too much time.” “The results are difficult to interpret.” “It’s just hard to learn how to do it.”   “The whole process is too difficult.” Sound familiar? I promise you, it’s not as bad as you think. There are a lot of misconceptions and outdated ideas about language sample analysis floating around out there. So ...

According to ASHA, evidence-based practice (EBP) in speech and language proceeds in a four-step process: Step 1: Framing the Clinical Question Step 2: Finding the Evidence Step 3: Assessing the Evidence Step 4: Making the Clinical Decision The examples ASHA provides to illustrate this four-step process highlight its use in determining the best intervention for a given situation. It str...

You didn’t get a degree in Speech-Language Pathology without at least hearing about language sample analysis (LSA). For those of us who had to learn to analyze a language sample by hand, I feel your pain. In another post, I share why I believe the labor-intensive, prone-to-error, by-hand method of LSA is outdated, unrealistic, and destructive to the process. I digress. Today’s entertaining read...

Another evaluation! Starting an evaluation can be a daunting task. You may have a vague idea of the language deficits of the student being referred; for example, you may have been told that the student offers minimal information during classroom discussions. He or she may be described as “getting by” in the classroom. As part of a comprehensive assessment, particularly where spoken language is ...