Our purpose is to highlight the contributions of TalkBank initiatives to improved understanding of clinical impairments in adult and child speakers and examine remaining challenges and proposed solutions. We review the origins and development of TalkBank initiatives that have targeted a wide array of typical and atypical child and adult…

Background: Communication impairments are a leading concern for parent caregivers of individuals with rare neurodevelopmental disorders (RNDDs). Clinical trials of disease modifying therapies require valid and responsive outcome measures that are relevant to individuals with RNDDs. Identifying and evaluating current psychometric properties for…

Purpose: Recent advances in artificial intelligence provide opportunities to capture and represent complex features of human language in a more automated manner, offering potential means of improving the efficiency of language assessment. This review article presents computerized approaches for the analysis of narrative language and identification…

This study investigates the familiarity with and application of Dynamic Assessment (DA) among Speech and Language Pathologists (SLPs) in Sweden, focusing on its use in diagnosing language disorders in children. Using a mixed-methods approach, survey data were collected from 565 SLPs, revealing that 72% were familiar with DA. However, a significant…

Purpose: Several studies have demonstrated that dynamic assessment can be a less biased, valid approach for the identification of language disorder among diverse school-age children. However, all prior studies have included a relatively small number of participants, which is generally not adequate for psychometric research. This is the first…

Background: The use of telepractice in aphasia research and therapy is increasing in frequency. Teleassessment in aphasia has been demonstrated to be reliable. However, neuropsychological and clinical language comprehension assessments are not always readily translatable to an online environment and people with severe language comprehension or…

Background: A number of practice barriers (e.g., time constraints, patient comorbidities and competing demands) exist as regards the evidence-based assessment of adult language within the acute hospital setting. There is need for an evidence-based, diagnostically validated, adaptable, comprehensive and efficient aphasia assessment. The Brisbane…

This work reports the results of a survey study conducted with French-, German-, and Italian-speaking speech and language therapists (SLTs) in Switzerland. In this survey we asked respondents about their language background, training in multilingual matters, and practices with multilingual patients, as well as their opinions on the current SLT…

The aim of this article was to evaluate the use of alternatives to traditional language sample analysis (LSA) measures with bilingual preschool-aged children. A database of 184 bilingual preschool children, including children with developmental language disorder (DLD), was used in this study. The goals of the study were to establish the convergent…

Clinical Question: For young AAE speakers (P), how useful is the Developmental Sentence Scoring (DSS) compared with Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) in identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in the presence of African American English (AAE)? Method: Structured Review. Study Sources: PsycInfo®, Education Source, Education Resources…

Purpose: For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in schools, outcome measurement is an important element of practice, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our service provision and guiding future decision making, funding, and resource allocation. When selecting outcomes to measure, it is helpful to consider both the level at which…

Background: In 2016/17, the CATALISE Consortium published the results of a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study, representing agreement among professionals about the definition and process of identification of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (Bishop et al., 2016, 2017). The extent to which the current…

Competent writing eludes many school children and adolescents, especially those with developmental language and reading disorders. Language sample analysis (LSA) of writing is a powerful but underused assessment tool that can also inform instruction. Similar to LSA of oral language, writing has been analyzed at word, sentence, and text levels…

Variability is common in language sample analysis (LSA), arising from personal factors such as age or level of education, or from factors within the text such as its length and purpose. Variability can affect interpretation of results in clinical practice and research studies, as well as the ability to detect change in individuals over time. This…

Purpose: Aphasia is a complex, neurogenic language disorder, with different aphasia syndromes hallmarked by impairment in fluency, auditory comprehension, naming, and/or repetition. Broad, standardized assessments of language domains and specific language and cognitive assessments provide a holistic impairment profile of a person with aphasia.…