How to cut the pie is no piece of cake: Toward a process-oriented approach to assessment and diagnosis of speech sound disorders.
Meghan Littlejohn, Edwin Maas
PMID 37483105WHAT IT FOUND
Speech sound errors alone cannot tell you if a child has a phonological or motor planning deficit because the same error can arise from different underlying processes.
Current diagnostic labels may miss these distinctions, but validated tools to test specific cognitive and motor processes do not yet exist.
Key findings
01Identical speech errors can result from different underlying impairments, making error analysis alone insufficient to distinguish phonological from motor deficits.
02A process-oriented approach is currently at the translational science stage and is too premature to provide immediately usable clinical recommendations.
03There is no set of validated tasks that comprehensively assesses all processes involved in speech production, and experimental methods may not be feasible for all children with SSD.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The paper is a theoretical proposal and review, not an empirical study, so it provides no new evidence on outcomes or treatment effects. The authors acknowledge that the proposed process-oriented approach is in early translational stages and lacks validated clinical tools. Experimental paradigms discussed often require specialized equipment and may exclude children with significant attention or severity issues.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret this paper as evidence that process-oriented assessment is ready for clinical use. The authors state clearly that it is premature to draw firm conclusions or make confident recommendations for clinical practice, and no validated tools are currently available.