Purpose
The goal of this clinical focus article is to illustrate how speech-language pathologists can document the functional language of school-age children using language sample analysis (LSA). Advances in computer hardware and software are detailed making LSA more accessible for clinical use.
Method
This clinical focus article illustrates how documenting school-age student's communicative functioning is central to comprehensive assessment and how using LSA can meet multiple needs within this assessment. LSA can document students' meaningful participation in their daily life through assessment of their language used during everyday tasks. The many advances in computerized LSA are detailed with a primary focus on the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (Miller & Iglesias, 2019). The LSA process is reviewed detailing the steps necessary for computers to calculate word, morpheme, utterance, and discourse features of functional language.
Conclusion
These advances in computer technology and software development have made LSA clinically feasible through standardized elicitation and transcription methods that improve accuracy and repeatability. In addition to improved accuracy, validity, and reliability of LSA, databases of typical speakers to document status and automated report writing more than justify the time required. Software now provides many innovations that make LSA simpler and more accessible for clinical use.
Supplemental Material
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12456719