Functional Communication Profile and speech-language diagnosis in children of the autism spectrum: checklist use

The use of a different protocol to assess the same aspects of the Functional Communication Profile (FCP) may contribute to a faster and less expensive determination of individual profiles of abilities and inabilities. The purpose of this study was to verify the applicability of a checklist to replace the aforementioned complete protocol as a way to facilitate clinical and therapeutic follow-up processes.

The participants in this study were 50 children aged from 3 to 12 years, with diagnoses within the autism spectrum who were receiving specialized speech-language therapy for at least six months. The participants were filmed while interacting with the speech-language pathologist, and the data were transcribed to the FCP protocol. After the recording and prior to the transcription, the speech-language pathologists were asked to answer the checklist of Communicative Functions.

All answers on the checklist and on the FCP were compared. The results indicated that there were statistical differences in nine of the 20 communicative functions, and in nine of the 50 children. These results suggest that the checklist is efficient to describe a group of children but not to characterize them individually. Therefore, it is possible to identify differences in the communicative profile but not to specify the frequency with which each function occurs.

The checklist can be used as a tool in the therapeutic follow-up processes of children with autism spectrum disorders, but it does not replace the complete FCP protocol.