LSA process

From toddlers with cochlear implants to adults with primary progressive aphasia (and everything in between), SALT has been part of researching people’s spoken language. Oh, and apes’ too! One of my great joys is consulting with researchers from Communication Sciences and Disorders, Psychology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Ed Psych and more and finding out their research interests to determine how...

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ASHA has a great article on dynamic assessment which gives a clear definition of dynamic assessment:  “Dynamic assessment (DA) is a method of conducting a language assessment which seeks to identify the skills that an individual child possesses as well as their learning potential. The dynamic assessment procedure emphasizes the learning process and accounts for the amount and nature of exa...

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Last month we talked about SALT and language sample analysis (LSA) for very young children. Typically, we think of language sample analysis as a tool for evaluating children. The truth is, language sample analysis should be a part of every evaluation where we are targeting expressive language skills, adults included! What is more functional for speech language rehab than being able to have a co...

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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 toolbox when assessing the very young and preschool-aged children as well!  Taking a language sample with very young chi...

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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 “gold standard” for assessing language in monolingual  and bilingual children. After you collect a language sample, you ca...

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Dressed in my “clinic outfit” in the modest room with the oversized two-way mirror, I’m ready to record. I have been instructed to elicit a conversational language sample from my client. My supervisor is behind that mirror. How hard can it be to get this child to talk with me?  What I thought would be the easiest part of the session turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. What was s...

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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: our own research was key in establishing the 50 complete, intelligible, and verbal utterance guideline. So, where does that numbe...

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Last November at ASHA we decided to focus our efforts on documenting progress in our talk, “Documenting Language Therapy Progress in School Settings.” It was exciting (and a bit nerve wracking) to present to a packed room, but we were so grateful for everyone who attended! Judging by the number of SLPs who showed up, it’s fair to say that the demand to demonstrate accountability as a school-bas...

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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 idea was to reduce the encumbrance of some of the steps, leaving clinicians with more time for interpreting the results. Over the years, SALT has worked to improve the con...

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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. But no one wants to contract COVID. Most of us are still figuring out what all of this means for our day-to-day practice. As I reflect on the first month...

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