Informal assessment of structural knowledge indicated depressed language form for social communication purposes. At times, he would speak in simple sentences and fragments, especially when he was required to engage in extended language production. These characteristics may impact his academic achievement, specifically in production and formulation of narratives and responses to verbal instructions and questions. In order to improve his ability to comprehend complex syntactic forms, intervention is warranted. Conversational and Pragmatics N~ exhibited poor use of flexible eye gaze, as he occasionally met the examiner’s eye gaze throughout the evaluation. …show more content…
He required numerous verbal prompted and reinforcement to provide information upon request and demonstrated limited social reciprocity. In terms of pragmatics development, N~ conveyed limited speech acts that included discourse, comment, protest, routine, and report (Gerber, 1987). During conversational exchange, N~ mainly responded to the examiner’s questions and required verbal prompts to elaborate on his answers. According to Gerber (1987), a child of N~’s age is expected to use language to code for the following functions: regulate-obtain information, regulate-obtain participation/invite, discourse- feedback, discourse-repair, or discourse-initiate a topic or turn take. He exhibited depressed maintenance of conversational exchanges and frequently stated that he wanted to go home. In addition, when he stated “I am angry” and “I got nervous” he was asked follow-up questions (e.g., what does angry mean) and did not demonstrate an understanding of his feelings. Overall, N~ demonstrated depressed skills for conversation, as indicated by poor use of flexible eye gaze. In addition, he experienced difficulty using language to code for various functions. Fluency N~’s fluency was informally assessed through a recorded conversational speech sample. Analysis of the conversational samples revealed that N~ demonstrates various types of disfluencies including prolongations, sound repetitions, and blocks. N~’s disfluencies were not accompanied by any secondary behaviors. According to Ms. R~ N~ was aware of his disfluencies and he stamps his feet or stops talking; however, these behaviors were not observed today. The Stuttering Severity Instrument-Fourth Edition (SSI-4) was administered to formally assess N~’s fluency. The SSI-4 is a norm-referenced assessment, that analyzes a child or adult’s stuttering severity. The SSI-4 assesses four speech behaviors of the examinee’s speech, (i.e., frequency, duration, physical concomitants, and naturalness of the examinee’s speech). Two 140-syllable speech samples were obtained to determine the frequency of disfluencies. Percent Syllables Stuttered (PSS) was calculated by dividing the number of disfluencies by the total number of syllables. PSS during a picture description activity was calculated to be 16 % and during conversation to be 14 %. N~’s frequency task score was 16. Duration score was calculated by averaging the duration, in seconds, of N~’s three longest stuttering events. N~ received a duration task score of 6, as his average duration of stuttering events was approximately 1.0-1.9 seconds. The