Functional video assessment — an alternative to the Cinderella story for use with dysphasic individuals

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Cinderella story is often used clinically in order to measure the effects of therapy with dysphasic patients. The language sample elicited is closely related to conversational speech thus making this task valuable for measuring generalisation effects of intervention. There are, however, often problems in administering the Cinderella story because: (1) It frequently elicits a small sample making analysis difficulty (Nickels et al., 1991); (2) It relies on the patient's ability to remember the story, which may be difficult without prompting (Byng et al., 1994); (3) The story targets low‐frequency words (prince, glass slipper, castle) which are rarely used in everyday conversation; (4) Dysphasic people often find this task difficult and thus stressful (Nickels et al., 1991); (5) There are suspected cultural influences. There is, therefore, a clinical need for an assessment similar to the Cinderella story, but is easier to administer and thus overcome the difficulties highlighted above. The Functional Video Assessment (FVA) was developed to meet this need. The FVA is a video recording of a person engaging in activities based on events that commonly occur in everyday life. Ten elderly retired non‐dysphasic subjects were interviewed to find out how they spent their time. From their replies, six topics for the video were chosen, ranging from ‘getting dressed’ to ‘buying plants at a garden centre’. The FVA has been administered to six dysphasic individuals. The language elicited by the FVA has been compared to that elicited from the following assessments: (1) Picture‐naming; (2) SVO picture description; (3) ‘Cookie Theft’ picture description; (4) the Cinderella story; (5) Conversational speech for each subject. The FVA has been evaluated in terms of the size of the language sample, how closely it related to conversational speech, how enjoyable the task is, and whether there are any memory constraints. The results of administering the assessment showed that, for each subject: (1) The FVA elicited the largest sample compared to the other assessments; (2) The FVA produced a language sample most closely related to speech in conversation; (3) The FVA was not stressful, on the contrary, subjects commented on how much they enjoyed the assessment; (4) There were no memory problems associated with the FVA since subjects could relate to it as common events in their own life. The FVA could be a useful alternative to use of the Cinderella story in order to elicit a large language sample which has been shown to be closely related to language used in conversation and therefore measures the effect of therapy intervention.