Phonological Assessment

The article, “Phonological Assessment: A Systematic Comparison of Conversation and Picture Naming” by Lesley Wolk and Andrew W. Meisler, compares to methods of speech elicitation. Both of these methods have positive and negative aspects. Assessing phonological treatment as citing is easy and effective. It allows the Speech Pathologist to have control with a set list of words. However, a main weakness is that a citing procedure may not be accurate. A clinician can overestimate a child’s abilities. This leaves an unnatural sample. An advantage of obtaining a sample through spontaneous conversation is that it allows a sample from the most natural situation. However, a sample from children who do not want to communicate, are shy, or have behavioral problems will affect results. This study contains information from thirteen participants who have phonological disorders. The participants are males in the age range of 4.2-5.11 years. Two conditions were implemented in this study: a picture naming task and a conversational speech task. The picture naming task contained of 162 simple line drawings with names that contained word initial consonant clusters and multisyllabic words.
I thought it was interesting to take to common elicitation methods and compare them. The study had great consistency. All participants were in the same age range, spoke English, had no prior experience with Speech Therapy, normal hearing, no behavioral problems, and had typical expressive and receptive language skills. The authors understood that other variables could possibly skew their results. When obtaining samples, the authors chose 162 words from both samples. They also tried to use words with consonant clusters and multiple syllables. The results of the study did match with some other studies done, but some did not. This shows that there is no proven “best” way of eliciting communication through a picture naming task and a conversational speech