The following three points highlight the objectives of this research:
- To determine if parents can effectively administer selected speech-language tests to their children suspected of having SM, parents will be trained by a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist or supervised graduate student to administer and score three tests (TNL,PPVT-4, EVT-2) and a brief measure of auditory memory. At the same time the parent is administering the tests, the speech-language pathologist (SLP) will be viewing the testing through a one-way mirror and also video-recording it for later comparison and analysis. For those children who do not comply with this on-site testing, parents may attempt to complete the assessments at home, videotaping the sessions for later appraisal. It is noted that children with SM will likely feel less anxious when tested by parents at home than at the clinical center. It is hypothesized that parents can be trained to be effective evaluators of their children with SM if given direction and training.
- To determine the incidence of communication disorders within this clinical sample, a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist will interpret the findings from the assessment to identify children with an actual speech and/or language disorder. It is hypothesized that a number of children with SM will have an actual communication disorder.
- To determine if the child’s speech-language difficulty is anxiety-based or an actual receptive / expressive speech-language disorder, two matched and randomly assigned groups of children will be compared using analysis of variance. Group 1 receiving parent testing followed by professional testing and group 2 receiving professional testing followed by parent testing will be compared regarding speech-language testing results. It is hypothesized that this type of randomized group assessment will more accurately determine the impact of anxiety on communication. It may be that a number of children with SM actually score as ‘false positive’ for speech-language disorders when the results may be due to anxiety. A false diagnosis often causes inaccurate school placement and/or implementation of improper services as well as misdirected treatment.