Expressive Vocabulary Test: The Goldman Fristoe Test Of Articulation

On Thursday morning, the supervisor informed the clinician of an African-American four-year old child who would be coming in the afternoon for a full speech and language evaluation. The child, Tyler, was referred to the clinic’s speech-language pathologist by his mother after she received a report from the pre-school teacher with concerns of speech and language development. Upon their arrival to the clinic, the mother was asked to fill out paperwork including a case history form. Given that the clinician had no prior knowledge other than his age, she chose a small battery of standardized tests that would provide an overall look at his current speech and language abilities and allowed time for a play-based language sample to be taken. Considering
The Goldman Fristoe Test of Articulation (GFTA-3) was selected to evaluate Tyler’s articulation abilities. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-4) was chosen to assess receptive vocabulary performance. The Expressive Vocabulary Test (EVT-2) was selected to assess expressive vocabulary performance, as well as to accompany the PPVT-4 for comparison of receptive and expressive vocabulary performance. A non-word repetition subtest would be administered from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Possessing (CTOPP-2) to examine word learning abilities, and a language sample would be collected to allow the clinician to observe Tyler’s communication abilities in a natural setting. The clinician allowed twenty minutes for the GFTA-3, fifteen minutes for the PPVT-4, fifteen minutes for the language sample, fifteen minutes for the EVT-2, and five minutes for the non-word repetition task. The clinician allowed for a break between the GFTA-3 and the PPVT-4, as well as between the EVT-2 and the non-word repetition task. She strategically placed the play-based language sample in the middle of the assessment to allow for a longer
A visual cue of the toy will be presented. Building off the visual representation, the clinician will use phonemic and semantic cues to aid in recall and encourage responses. Information Tyler provides about therapy items would be emphasized. For example, in the above script, Tyler said the monkey is brown, so the clinician will use that as part of the semantic cue. To facilitate generalization of the three short-term goals, the clinician will use tactics such as auditory bombardment and providing various examples of vocabulary words. Auditory bombardment has been shown to facilitate generalization in grammatical morphemes (Plante et. al. 2018). The clinician will continue to “bombard” Tyler with examples of the targeted grammatical morphemes during therapy sessions using past tense –ed and third person singular –s. Providing many, different examples of words has been shown to facilitate generalization in vocabulary (Aguilar et. al., 2018). Therefore, the clinician will explain that there are many ways to describe one word. For example, an “apple” can be described as “fruit”, “red/green”, “round”,