ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how early assessment procedures measured changes in response between impaired and non-impaired communicators. It outlines some historical perspective in the rationale regarding the assessment of communication disorder. The chapter attempts to classify the different assessment processes. It describes the process of assessment with the communicatively impaired population. Assessments were a two-fold attempt to describe how children’s development of speech sounds differed in relation to those of their peers and also how their production of speech could be described using simple place, manner and voicing parameters. The assessment of voice disorder was, like aphasia, strongly influenced by medical practice. Therapists of stuttering have surely benefited most from the field of behavioural psychiatry. But fewer therapists worked with aphasics, voice-disordered clients and stutterers together, compared with the numbers of therapists working with children. In the early 1970s the application of linguistic knowledge developed in two especially interesting directions for speech and language therapy.