This text-based course is a transcript of the webinar, “Measuring Speech Adaptability in Speech Sound Disorders,” presented by Amy Glaspey, Ph.D., CCC-SLP.
>> Amy Glaspey: Let’s start with the learner outcomes. These are some goals that I hope that you will achieve by the end of the session. I hope you be able to define differences between static and dynamic assessment, describe how stimulability has been used in speech language pathology in the past, list the benefits of measuring speech adaptability, and describe procedures involved in administering one dynamic assessment for phonological disorders.
Background and Significance
I would like to start with the background and significance, and lead you through a history of how I have come to a different view on assessment. What I have been working on is a measure, and I am using the term ‘speech adaptability’. I have defined speech adaptability as responsiveness to cues across a wide range of systematically varied linguistic context (Glaspey, 2012). The development of the measure that I have been working on and this idea of speech adaptability have really been built from past literature in the area stimulability and dynamic assessment.
Stimulability
Let’s start with stimulability. What procedures do you think of when you hear this term “stimulability”? What is interesting about this term is I am on all kinds of Listservs and I get junk mail. This junk mail comes from the chemical world, the electronic world, etc. and so this term is used in many different ways that were unknown to me. Even in our own world of speech language pathology, stimulability can have quite a varied difference in meaning. I am going to go through one definition.
Stimulability, by Miccio 2002, was defined as correctly imitating a sound when auditory and visual cues are given for a previously incorrect production. If you ask any clinician how they do stimulability testing, they will give you a really broad range. Some people give verbal models; other people have visual cues and others have tactile cues. The linguistic environment in which people conduct stimulability might be in isolation, at the syllable level, at the word level, sentence level, and that can be pretty variable as well. Stimulability, from a historical perspective, has been used a long time for diagnosis, prognosis, and also for target selection.
