Augmentative and Alternative Communication and Language

Abstract

Summary measures based on logfile datafrom language samples have their foundationin well-documented traditional measures oflanguage performance. Many of the utterance-based and word-based summary measuresfound in the AAC performance report(Figure 3) should be familiar to cliniciansroutinely analyzing language samples or usingSALT. These summary measures may includethe number of complete utterances, meanlength of utterance, number of differentword roots, or total number of words usedin the sample. An AAC performance reportcould be used to compare back to the EBPexample about the clinician interested in corevocabulary. Use of LAM allows the clinician togenerate a word frequency list to comparethe core vocabulary used by her client withthe core vocabulary from one or more ofthe studies found as evidence. In addition,Hill (2001) reported performance indiceson several SALT summary measures for theadults in the study. Consequently, an AACperformance report would provide severalrelated statistics to chart progress related tovocabulary activity with the AAC system.Many clinicians are concerned with vocab-ulary use by preschoolers rather than adults,but the same principles of EBP apply. Vo-cabulary lists generated using PeRT could be