Why is measuring communication difficult? A critical review of current speech pathology concepts and measures

Abstract

Human society is organised through communicative interactions between co-present people. Speech pathology (SP) assessment and intervention strategies aim to access these sites of communication in order to facilitate participation in life situations for people with communication disorders. Surprisingly, however, there is no explicit theory of communication underpinning SP practice and research. As a result, the conceptual and practical basis for rigorous, empirical measurement of communication remains limited, which is a significant challenge for professional practice and research. This critical review discusses the prevailing ways that co-present communication has been conceptualised and measured in SP. In particular, we examine how models of health have informed current ideas and measurement practices. We argue that although patently valuable for SP, they are largely incommensurate with the realities of co-present communication. Drawing on current empirical research in Sociology and Linguistics, we specify the properties of real-time co-present communication and discuss their relationship to current SP concepts and measurement practices. We conclude by suggesting directions for conceptual development and empirical research that will draw SP assessment and intervention strategies closer to real-time co-present communication.

The importance of situated language use for aphasia rehabilitation

“…Firstly, any attempt to capture someone's communicative ability in a single number should be considered uninformative (Barnes & Bloch, 2018). The model delineates three major components, which in turn can be broken up into dif- speaking on the phone, sending an email or text message, or speaking face-to-face, it has been suggested that to evaluate the principles that govern situated language use, one can start by studying the most basic form: face-to-face communication (Barnes & Bloch, 2018;Clark, 1996;McDermott & Tylbor, 1983;Pickering & Garrod, 2004;Bavelas & Chovil, 2000), as it is the most commonly used and pervasive form of communication, it is universal to all human societies, it is the basis for typical language acquisition in children and it does not require education or special skills (Bavelas & Chovil, 2000;Clark, 1996). Indeed, Davidson et al (2008) showed that face-to-face conversation is the most frequently occurring communicative activity in daily life for PWA.…”

“…This in turn is separated from their level of participation in everyday life, and the ICF also defines personal and external factors that might be of influence across these different levels of functioning. Barnes & Bloch (2018) argue that the ICF is not able to capture everyday communication as it gives a limited view of communication as a fundamentally individual competence, that can be standardized separately from different contextual variations. Glueckauf et al (2003) criticised the ASHA-FACS for measuring the degree of independence in communication (i.e.…”

“…There is a growing understanding that the traditional approach to the study of language in vacuo, i.e. studying single words and sentences in isolation, does not necessarily tell us something about actual language use in the real world (Vigliocco et al, 2014;Clark, 1996;Willems, 2015;Hasson et al, 2018;Barnes & Bloch, 2018). The study of natural language use poses several challenges and requires 1 The aim of this article is to propose a specific and measurable definition of situated language use, based on the now extensive literature in the fields of psychology, communication sciences, linguistics, psycholinguistics and sociology with healthy adults as well as PWA.…”

“…individual skills) and external (e.g. environmental) factors that influence a person's ability to communicate efficiently, thereby moving away from the idea that communicative ability can be boiled down to a single number Barnes & Bloch, 2018. The article will be structured as follows: a review of how language use is defined in the field of aphasiology, focusing on the instruments that are used to measure situated language use in aphasia.…”

Innovations for Supporting Communication: Opportunities and Challenges for People with Complex Communication Needs

“…Tools from conversational analysis offer rich promise in furthering our understanding of “co-present interaction” [39]. However, the potential power of these approaches is in tension with the time demands they imply.…”