Did you know that SALT is a great tool to use when assessing very young children? Many users think of SALT as a tool for school-aged children. While SALT does offer several databases for school-aged children, language sample analysis should also be in every clinician’s [...]
Should I include pauses in my transcript? The Awkward Pause! We’ve all been there. Maybe the awkward pause was during a casual conversation with a friend, or when you were talking to someone new at a party and ran out of interesting things to say. [...]
Background The way we talk is a window into who we are, where we came from, and how others perceive us. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) the locals thought I had an accent. Some vocabulary words are different in the PNW. [...]
You may have noticed that some methods of language sample analysis ask you to include mazes in transcription, while others do not. SALT does ask you to include mazes. Have you ever wondered why? Perhaps you had the sneaking suspicion that, if some protocols exclude [...]
When you learned about language sample analysis in grad school, you probably heard that sample length may vary but that you should aim for about fifty utterances. In the “olden days” we were shooting for 15 minutes or 100 utterances; whichever came first. I’ll gloat: [...]
This has been a challenging fall to say the least. We have all been thrown into remote learning or a hybrid version of school. Tensions are high among parents wanting their kids back in school and teachers wanting to be back in school as well. [...]
How SALT Evolved Since the first version of SALT software in 1981, before we even had a name for it, our focus was on how to coax a computer to carry out as much of the labor of language sample analysis (LSA) as possible. The [...]
Dear Clinical Colleagues, I hope this finds you relatively safe and sane. Language sample analysis may be a challenge to your limited time and resources. Don’t you wish you COULD fit language sampling into your busy schedule? After all, language sampling is part of the [...]
In the first installment of this article we discussed the case of Brendan Dassey, a young man with language disorder who was tried and convicted of murder despite profoundly problematic police interrogation methods. Brendan was a minor at the time. Brendan’s case was both tragic [...]
Stuttering is a childhood-onset disorder of speech fluency that has an incidence of ~5% in preschool age children and a prevalence of ~1% in adults (Bloodstein & Ratner, 2008). For most children, stuttering begins between the age of 2-5 years (Guitar, 2019). With the relatively [...]
