The therapist will perform a physical exam of your child's face and mouth, evaluate your child's ability to communicate, speak, speak clearly, express thoughts, follow instructions, interact with others, and understand the things that are being said to him. An SLP evaluation can include formal and informal evaluation measures. Formal measures are standardized assessment tools that have been referenced in populations similar to those of your client. These evaluations help determine how your client compares to peers of the same age in communication tasks.
If your child is able to do so, the therapist will perform a speech evaluation to formally assess their skills in the area that concerns them. If your child has problems with speech sounds, the therapist will often begin the evaluation with an examination of the oral mechanism. The fourth edition of the Arizona Articulatory Competence Scale is a comprehensive assessment of the articulation of speech sounds in English that is based on standards for children aged 18 months to 21 years.
If your child passes the hearing test, the pediatrician may refer your child to a speech therapist (SLP) or a speech therapist.
The speech therapist will have chosen in advance a standardized and formal evaluation tool depending on the diagnosis and the questions you have.As a speech therapist, this is one of my favorite tests because it really looks at every aspect of a child's language skills. Speech therapist evaluations provide important information about the client that can help determine the most effective and appropriate treatment plan. In the case of speech sound errors, the test consists of asking the child to name the images while the therapist transcribes the child's speech sounds using phonetics. Many speech and language skills can be observed through a simple activity, such as rolling a ball back and forth or playing with simulated food.
Instead of starting a long debate in which I repeat the information that has already been told to me, the best advice I give to people who contact me to inform me about public speaking and language services is to follow their instincts. If you have any questions about your speech and language development, don't hesitate to make an evaluation. This will determine if your child's communication problems are due to a hearing problem or not to a speech disorder. If a child can understand more than what they're expressing, that's a key sign that they may have apraxia of speech.
Your child being screened doesn't automatically mean he or she has a speech disorder; the SLP will determine this during the evaluation. The really good thing about this test is that it answers a variety of questions related to referral, such as eligibility to access public speaking services, placement in special education, determining the presence of a language delay or disorder, or measuring the language skills of English learners.
