Effects of Elicitation Method on Functionally Relevant Item Selection in Spanish and English Monolinguals and...

One important decision speech language pathologists make when planning anomia treatment is the identification and selection of the specific vocabulary items to target during therapy. However, this process is not entirely straightforward. Although 'functional relevance' has high face validity for the identification of target items, interpretations differ, which may impact which words are selected for therapy. As such, target item selection methods vary, with resulting items impacted by the specific method used. There are also many person-level variables that may impact the functional relevance of specific items, such as the heritage language of the patient or their bilingualism status. The overall purpose of this study is to determine how elicitation methods affect the selection of functionally relevant targets for anomia treatment. A secondary aim is to determine how heritage language and bilingualism status influence the specific targets selected.

Twenty-three monolingual Spanish speakers, 81 monolingual English speakers and 59 English-Spanish bilingual participants were sampled according to two different elicitation methods: First, a 'blank canvas' question (which requested a list of 25 words the participant would choose if they only had them to communicate), followed by a series of open-ended questions (which represented realistic communication scenarios to elicit naturalistic responses). Responses were organized into corpora by elicitation method and by language group. Psycholinguistic characteristics, part of speech category and thematic analysis category of the top words in each corpus were identified. Effects of the independent variables on the dependent variables were compared descriptively and analysed inferentially using Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney tests and chi-square analyses.

Results indicated effects of the elicitation method on all of the psycholinguistic characteristics examined. Language group had fewer effects. Effects were replicated when analyses were repeated with function words removed.

The results showed significant effects of elicitation method on the selection of functionally relevant vocabulary items, with lists developed using the blank canvas method being significantly more concrete and noun-heavy compared to those developed using frequency data from functional communication prompt responses. This was true regardless of bilingualism status or Spanish or English background. These findings speak to the differences between linguistic intuition and actual linguistic usage. Understanding these differences should inform anomia treatment target selection by increasing the functional relevance of target selection during therapy for speakers of both English and Spanish, both monolingual and bilingual. A combination of the blank canvas method and a frequency-based method is recommended.

What is already known on this subject It is obvious that clinicians should select words of high functional relevance when choosing words to work on with clients with anomia. However, this is a complex process not fully understood. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study adds empirical data to previous discussions on how different methods impact words selected for treatment. It replicates the findings in monolingual and bilingual Spanish and English speakers. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Clinicians would do well to combine different interpretations of functional relevance in order to optimize the words selected as targets for their clients.