Kristin Dattoria MS, CCC-SLP

Lee, J.B. and Azios, J.H. (2020). Facilitator behaviors leading to engagement and disengagement in aphasia conversation groups. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 29 : 393-411.  This article was sent to me by a researcher and one of my former professors and clinical supervisors at California State University, Northridge, Ms. Sarah Cathcart. An expert in conversation facilitation for groups of varying degrees of aphasia and apraxia of speech, Ms. Cathcart is someone I continue to turn to for to talk shop.  Purpose : To know more about what graduate student facilitators of aphasia conversation groups do to, well, facilitate conversation. What do they do right? What mistakes do they make? How could they and their supervisors learn from those successes and failures? Method : Researchers analyzed recordings of 4 aphasia conversation groups led by graduate student clinicians at 2 universities, one in the southern US and one in the eastern US. Graduate clinicians were giv...

Kern Koegel, L., Koegel, R.L., Ashbaugh, K., & Bradshaw, J. (2014). The importance of early identification and intervention for children with or at risk for autism spectrum disorders.  International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 16 (1): 50-56. I am putting two articles in this post because I believe they are both clinically useful for talking to parents, teachers, and school districts with children with or at-risk for ASD. The first article, Kern Koegel et al. (2014), delineates several reasons why early identification and intervention by a speech-language pathologist or team of therapists for children at-risk for ASD is so important. This article can also be used as an update on information that still lingers--especially the idea that ASD can't be diagnosed till age 3. Researchers have found this is simply not true. Earlier diagnosis can lead to better outcomes for families and children. Furthermore, if you need another reason to support earlier diagnosis, the articl...

Masterson, J.J. & Kamhi, A.G. (1992). Linguistic trade-offs in school-aged children with and without language disorders.  Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 35 : 1064-1075. This article is one that I think of often when I'm analyzing the profile of an individual child. It reminds me that the linguistic behavior of a child is not isolated, but rather part of a constellation of factors. Further, the reason for a linguistic behavior (such as stuttering on words, word retrieval, or incorrect grammar) may vary depending on the task, setting, conversation partner, cognitive abilities, or language abilities of the child. Just because one behavior of a child looks similar to the behavior of another child does not mean the underlying reason for that behavior is the same. As well, it reminds me that although typically developing children present with grammatical, phonemic, morphosyntactic, and fluency errors, children with language-learning disabilities are much more likely to hav...

Van Stan, J., Roy, N., Awan, S., Stemple, J. & Hillman, R.E. (2015). A taxonomy of voice therapy. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 24: 101-125. I often try to post articles that I think are helpful because they cover a lot of ground. This article does that,  and  it is an article that truly changed my way of thinking about speech therapy. Before reading this article, I thought about speech in the way my university had organized it for me--by classes. There's the voice class, motor speech disorders, swallowing, language disorders, etc...yet I never stopped to think that there might be a more personal way of organizing speech therapy for myself. This article opened that personal avenue for me; it changed my way of thinking. In brief, this article looked at several different textbooks, hospital therapy notes, courses, and articles in order to try and find a common thread between voice terms. The authors sought to systemize and streamline the way voice ther...

I am officially in my first month of my clinical fellowship year and ready for more learning ahead. I am starting out in a school district with a primarily low-income, multilingual population of students, who also often experience high-risk situations and trauma at home. There are few classes or clinical experiences that can prepare you for how to assess and analyze the assessments of children in these situations. Dynamic assessment, at least in my program, seemed so untouchable to me when I was in graduate school--I knew its definition, but not how to actually do it. Yet the more I have used dynamic assessment tools, the more I see why they are so vital to understanding the nuances of children who do not fit into the middle class, English-speaking standardized tests that so many of our assessments are based upon. I do not want to ignore the great standardized assessments that have come out for Spanish speakers, such as the BAPA (Bilingual Articulation and Phonology Assessment), and ...

Cicerone, et al. (2011). Evidence-based cognitive rehabilitation: Updated review of the literature 2003 to 2008. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 92 (4): 519-530. In graduate school, one of the best tips that Dr. Michael Biel gave us was this: Use systematic reviews. You may have seen a theme of this so far in the few blog posts I've written up to this point--and it's because I think he was right. Systematic reviews are a wealth of information. Systematic reviews essentially are when a team of experts or one expert chooses a topic, i.e. cognitive rehabilitation, and sets up a system to review several articles on that topic. The criteria for what articles make the cut are usually detailed in the introduction of the review. The criteria might be by year, type of patient, type of therapy, or any number of other criteria selected by the reviewer(s). The reviewer(s) then find patterns in the articles and organize the articles by subtopics. They then make general a...

Comps...the big exams that every grad student dreads are tough. Although not every Masters in Communication Disorders program requires it, those students that have had to take them know that a lot of time, effort, and work goes into jumping over this final hurdle. For our Masters program, we each could create a binder to take into the oral portion of our exams. Although it took weeks of late nights and stressful days to put together, I now have an amazing set of resources in one place. All throughout putting this binder together, I wished I'd had more time to do it. Thus, whether you're reading this early in your program or coming up on comps soon, I've put together this short list of the resources that helped me piece together the many concepts we learn in graduate school. Note 1: I am writing this after a restful holiday and several weeks post-exams. Feeling positive about this monster of a binder did not happen overnight 😆. Note 2: This post is as of January 8,...