Search Results for: auditory processing

Posted on

Language Processing Checklist for Preschool Children 3:0-5:11 Years of Age

APD checklsit for preschoolersChildren at risk for auditory processing deficits can begin displaying difficulties processing and using language at a very early age (before 3).

By the time these children reach preschool age (3+ years) they may present with obvious signs and symptoms of language processing deficits, which may require further screening and intervention. Continue reading Language Processing Checklist for Preschool Children 3:0-5:11 Years of Age

Posted on

Language Processing Deficits (LPD) Checklist for School Aged Children

Need a Language Processing Deficits Checklist for School Aged Children

You can find it in my online store HERE

This checklist was created to assist speech-language pathologists (SLPs) with figuring out whether the student presents with language processing deficits which require further follow-up (e.g., screening, comprehensive assessment). The SLP should provide this form to both teacher and caregiver/s to fill out to ensure that the deficit areas are consistent across all settings and people.

Checklist Categories:

  • Listening Skills and Short Term Memory
  • Verbal Expression
  • Emergent Reading/Phonological Awareness
  • General Organizational Abilities
  • Social-Emotional Functioning
  • Behavior
  • Supplemental* Caregiver/Teacher Data Collection Form
  • Select assessments sensitive to Auditory Processing Deficits
Posted on

Creating a Comprehensive Speech Language Therapy Environment

Image result for comprehensiveSo you’ve completed a thorough evaluation of your student’s speech and language abilities and are in the process of creating goals and objectives to target in sessions. The problem is that many of the students on our caseloads present with pervasive deficits in many areas of language.

While it’s perfectly acceptable to target just a few goals per session in order to collect good data, both research and clinical experience indicate that addressing goals comprehensively and thematically (the whole system or multiple goals at once from the areas of content, form, and use) via contextual language intervention vs. in isolation (small parts such as prepositions, pronouns, etc.) will bring about the quickest change and more permanent results.

So how can that be done? Well, for significantly language impaired students it’s very important to integrate semantic language components as well as verbal reasoning tasks into sessions no matter what type of language activity you are working on (such as listening comprehension, auditory processing, social inferencing and so on). The important part is to make sure that the complexity of the task is commensurate with the student’s level of abilities.

Let’s say you are working on a fall themed lesson plans which include topics such as apples and pumpkins. As you are working on targeting different language goals, just throw in  a few extra components to the session and ask the child to make, produce, explain, list, describe, identify, or interpret:

  • Associations (“We just read a book about pumpkin: What goes with a pumpkin?”)
  • Synonyms (“It said the leaves felt rough, what’s another word for rough?”)
  • Antonyms (“what is the opposite of rough?”)
  • Attributes 5+ (category, function, location, appearance, accessory/necessity, composition) (“Pretend I don’t know what a pumpkin is, tell me everything you can think of about a pumpkin”)
  • Multiple Meaning Words (“The word felt has two meanings, it could mean _____ and it could also mean _______”)
  • Definitions (“what is a pumpkin”)
  • Compare and Contrast (“How are pumpkin and apple alike? How are they different?”)
  • Idiomatic expressions (“Do you know what the phrase turn into a pumpkin means?” )

Ask ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions in order to start teaching the student how to justify, rationalize, evaluate, and make judgments regarding presented information (“Why do you think we plant pumpkins in the spring and not in the fall?”)

Don’t forget the inferencing and predicting questions in order to further develop the client’s verbal reasoning abilities (“What do you think will happen if no one picks up the apples from the ground?)

If possible attempt to integrate components of social language into the session such as ask client to relate to a character in a story, interpret the character’s feelings (“How do you think the girl felt when her sisters made fun of her pumpkin?”), ideas and thoughts, or just read nonverbal social cues such as body language or facial expressions of characters in pictures.

Select materials which are both multipurpose and reusable as well as applicable to a variety of therapy goals. For example, let’s take a simple seasonal word wall such as the (free) —Fall Word Wall  from TPT by Pocketful of Centers. Print it out in color, cut out the word strips and note how many therapy activities you can target for articulation, language, fluency, literacy and phonological awareness, etc.

fall word wall

Language:

Practice Categorization skills via convergent and divergent naming activities: Name Fall words, Name Halloween/Thanksgiving Words, How many trees  whose leaves change color can you name?, how many vegetables and fruits do we harvest in the fall? etc.

Practice naming Associations: what goes with a witch (broom), what goes with a squirrel (acorn), etc

Practice providing Attributes via naming category, function, location, parts, size, shape, color, composition, as well as accessory/necessity.  For example, (I see a pumpkin. It’s a fruit/vegetable that you can plant, grow and eat. You find it on a farm. It’s round and orange and is the size of a ball. Inside the pumpkin are seeds. You can carve it and make a jack o lantern out of it).

Practice providing Definitions: Tell me what a skeleton is. Tell me what a scarecrow is.

Practice naming Similarities and Differences among semantically related items: How are pumpkin and apple alike? How are they different?

Practice explaining Multiple Meaning words:   What are some meanings of the word bat, witch, clown, etc?

Practice Complex Sentence Formulation: what happens in the fall? Make up a sentence with the words scarecrow and unless, make up a sentence with the words skeleton and however, etc

Phonological Awareness:

Practice Rhyming words (you can do discrimination and production activities): cat/bat/ trick/leaf/ rake/moon

Practice Syllable and Phoneme Segmentation  (I am going to say a word (e.g., leaf, corn, scarecrow, etc) and I want you to clap one time for each syllable or sound I say)

Practice Isolation of initial, medial, and final phonemes in words ( e.g., What is the beginning/final  sound in apple, hay, pumpkin etc?) What is the middle sound in rake etc?

Practice Initial and Final Syllable and Phoneme Deletion in Words  (Say spider! Now say it without the der, what do you have left? Say witch, now say it without the /ch/ what is left; say corn, now say it without the /n/, what is left?)

Articulation/Fluency:

Practice production of select sounds/consonant clusters that you are working on or just production at word or sentence levels with those clients who just need a little bit more work in therapy increasing their intelligibility or sentence fluency.

So next time you are targeting your goals, see how you can integrate some of these suggestions into your data collection and let me know whether or not you’ve felt that it has enhanced your therapy sessions.

Happy Speeching! Thankful Clip Art Printable owl card

Helpful Resources:

 

 

Posted on

Treatment of Children with “APD”: What SLPs Need to Know

Free stock photo of people, woman, cute, playingIn recent years there has been an increase in research on the subject of diagnosis and treatment of Auditory Processing Disorders (APD), formerly known as Central Auditory Processing Disorders or CAPD.

More and more studies in the fields of audiology and speech-language pathology began confirming the lack of validity of APD as a standalone (or useful) diagnosis. To illustrate, in June 2015, the American Journal of Audiology published an article by David DeBonis entitled: “It Is Time to Rethink Central Auditory Processing Disorder Protocols for School-Aged Children.” In this article, DeBonis pointed out numerous inconsistencies involved in APD testing and concluded that “routine use of APD test protocols cannot be supported” and that [APD] “intervention needs to be contextualized and functional” (DeBonis, 2015, p. 124)

Image result for time to rethink quotesFurthermore, in April 2017, an article entitled: “AAA (2010) CAPD clinical practice guidelines: need for an update” (also written by DeBonnis) concluded that the “AAA CAPD guidance document will need to be updated and re-conceptualised in order to provide meaningful guidance for clinicians” due to the fact that the “AAA document … does not reflect the current literature, fails to help clinicians understand for whom auditory processing testing and intervention would be most useful, includes contradictory suggestions which reduce clarity and appears to avoid conclusions that might cast the CAPD construct in a negative light. It also does not include input from diverse affected groups. All of these reduce the document’s credibility.” 

Image result for systematic reviewIn April 2016, de Wit and colleagues published a systematic review in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. They reviewed research studies which described the characteristics of APD in children to determine whether these characteristics merited a label of a distinct clinical disorder vs. being representative of other disorders.  After a search of 6 databases, they chose 48 studies which satisfied appropriate inclusion criteria. Unfortunately, they unearthed only one study with strong methodological quality. Even more disappointing was that the children in these studies presented with incredibly diverse symptomology. The authors concluded that “The listening difficulties of children with APD may be a consequence of cognitive, language, and attention issues rather than bottom-up auditory processing” (de Wit et al., 2016, p. 384).  In other words, none of the reviewed studies had conclusively proven that APD was a distinct clinical disorder.  Instead, these studies showed that the children diagnosed with APD exhibited language-based deficits. In other words, the diagnosis of APD did not reveal any new information regarding the child beyond the fact that s/he is in great need of a comprehensive language assessment in order to determine which language-based interventions s/he would optimally benefit from.

Now, it is important to reiterate that students diagnosed with “APD” present with legitimate symptomology (e.g., difficulty processing language, difficulty organizing narratives, difficulty decoding text, etc.). However, all the research to date indicates that these symptoms are indicative of broader language-based deficits, which require targeted language/literacy-based interventions rather than recommendations for specific prescriptive programs (e.g., CAPDOTS, Fast ForWord, etc.) or mere in-school accommodations.

Image result for dig deeper quotesUnfortunately, on numerous occasions when the students do receive the diagnosis of APD,  the testing does not “dig further,” which leads to many of them not receiving appropriate comprehensive language-literacy assessments.  Furthermore, APD then becomes the “primary” diagnosis for the student, which places SLPs in situations in which they must address inappropriate therapeutic targets based on an audiologist’s recommendations.  Even worse, in many of these situations, the diagnosis of APD limits the provision of appropriate language-based services to the student.

Since the APD controversy has been going on for years with no end in sight despite the mounting evidence pointing to the lack of its validity, we know that SLPs will continue to have students on their caseloads diagnosed with APD. Thus, the aim of today’s post is to offer some constructive suggestions for SLPs who are asked to assess and treat students with “confirmed” or suspected APD.

The first suggestion comes directly from Dr. Alan Kamhi, who states: “Do not assume that a child who has been diagnosed with APD needs to be treated any differently than children who have been diagnosed with language and learning disabilities” (Kamhi, 2011, p. 270).  In other words, if one carefully analyzes the child’s so-called processing issues, one will quickly realize that those issues are not related to the processing of auditory input  (auditory domain) since the child is not processing tones, hoots, or clicks, etc. but rather has difficulty processing speech and language (language domain).

If a student with confirmed or suspected APD is referred to an SLP, it is important, to begin with formal and informal assessments of language and literacy knowledge and skills. (details HERE)   SLPs need to “consider non-auditory reasons for listening and comprehension difficulties, such as limitations in working memory, language knowledge, conceptual abilities, attention, and motivation (Kamhi & Wallach, 2012).

Image result for language goalsAfter performing a comprehensive assessment, SLPs need to formulate language goals based on determined areas of weaknesses. Please note that a systematic review by Fey and colleagues (2011) found no compelling evidence that auditory interventions provided any unique benefit to auditory, language, or academic outcomes for children with diagnoses of (C)APD or language disorder. As such it’s important to avoid formulating goals focused on targeting isolated processing abilities like auditory discrimination, auditory sequencing, recognizing speech in noise, etc., because these processing abilities have not been shown to improve language and literacy skills (Fey et al., 2011; Kamhi, 2011).

Instead, SLPs need to target we need to focus on the language underpinnings of the above skills and turn them into language and literacy goals. For example, if the child has difficulty recognizing speech in noise, improve the child’s knowledge and access to specific vocabulary words.  This will help the child detect the word when the auditory information is degraded.  Child presents with phonemic awareness deficits? Figure out where in the hierarchy of phonemic awareness their strengths and weaknesses lie and formulate goals based on the remaining areas in need of mastery.  Received a description of the child’s deficits from the audiologist in an accompanying report? Turn them into language goals as well!  Turn “prosodic deficits” or difficulty understanding the intent of verbal messages into “listening for details and main ideas in stories” goals.   In other words, figure out the language correlate to the ‘auditory processing’ deficit and replace it.

Image result for quackeryIt is easy to understand the appeal of using dubious practices which promise a quick fix for our student’s “APD deficits” instead of labor-intensive language therapy sessions. But one must also keep something else in mind as well:   Acquiring higher order language abilities takes a significant period of time, especially for those students whose skills and abilities are significantly below age-matched peers.

APD Summary 

  1. There is still no compelling evidence that APD is a stand-alone diagnosis with clear diagnostic criteria.
  2. There is still no compelling evidence that auditory deficits are a “significant risk factor for  language or academic performance.”
  3. There is still no compelling evidence that “auditory interventions provide any unique benefit to auditory, language, or academic outcomes” (Hazan, Messaoud-Galusi, Rosan, Nouwens, & Shakespeare, 2009; Watson & Kidd, 2009).
  4. APD deficits are language based deficits which accompany a host of developmental conditions ranging from developmental language disorders to learning disabilities, etc.
  5. SLPs should perform comprehensive language and literacy assessments of children diagnosed with APD.
  6. SLPs should target   literacy goals.
  7. SLPS should be wary of any goals or recommendations which focus on remediation of isolated skills such as: “auditory discrimination, auditory sequencing, phonological memory, working memory, or rapid serial naming” since studies have definitively confirmed their lack of effectiveness (Fey et al., 2011).
  8. SLPs should be wary of any prescriptive programs offering APD “interventions” and instead focus on improving children’s abilities for functional communication including listening, speaking, reading, and writing (see Wallach, 2014: Improving Clinical Practice: A School-Age and School-Based Perspective).  This article  “presents a conceptual framework for intervention at school-age levels” and discusses “advanced levels of language that move beyond preschool and early elementary grade goals and objectives with a focus on comprehension and meta-abilities.”

There you have it!  Students diagnosed with APD are best served by targeting the language and literacy problems that are affecting their performance in school. 

Related Posts: