How One Goes About Assessing Language Disorders

Speech disorder assessment An Assignment Submitted by Name of Student Name of Establishment Class XXXX, Section XXXX, Fall 2011 Language disorders are speech ailments associated with the handling of linguistic information in thought and expression. Challenges experienced among people with language disorders may range from grammatical to semantic, causing mispronunciations, poor intonation, etc. Examples of language disorders include aphasia, pragmatic language impairment, anomic aphasia, developmental verbal dyspraxia, dysprosody, speech sound disorder, auditory verbal agnosia, dyscravia, etc. Clinicians choose the most suitable techniques to employ for specific individuals based on a number of factors including age, cultural milieu, disorder severity, language profile, cognitive operation, hearing abilities, etc. Each of these factors has specific usefulness in the assessment and a brief examination of each will illustrate the point. Age is the most important factor because some disorders are age specific or preponderant in certain age groups. Some disorders are only there up to a certain age then they disappear while others appear from a certain age. Cultural background also has an influence because of intonations and pronunciations that may predispose speakers to ignore or stress certain sounds. The severity is also important because some disorders are only curable up to a certain degree (Dodd, 2013, Ch8). The process of assessing language disorders involves three basic steps; screening, comprehensive assessment and diagnosis. Screening takes place at the point where an individual is suspected to have a language disorder. Its purpose is simply to determine whether there is need for deeper assessments or if a problem is simply fleeting. Some of the processes undertaken with screening include interviews with parents, teachers, close relations, etc.; screening for hearing ability; age specific speech tests, etc. Once these are complete then a recommendation may arise such as; full language appraisal; full audiologic appraisal or detailed speech appraisal. This leads to the next stage which is comprehensive assessments which will look at issues such as; unique individual’s history; oral operations assessment and speech process testing. From the results at the screening stage, clinicians can employ various comprehensive assessments to enable diagnosis. An example of a language disorder that has specific tools to address it is Aphasia, the inability to understand and formulate speech due to damage in parts of the brains as a result of stroke or head trauma. The Aphasia Rapid Test is such a test and is ba...