Week 3 Update

Tuesday was another lab day with Dr. Ingram. I was excited because I got to start working on a project using data from a survey my mom filled out about Quince's language. This survey is called the Macarthur-Bates communicative Development Inventory (CDI). It lists ten pages of phrases and words, with an option to indicate that the child understands, says, or signs each one. The part of the survey I am interested in is the vocabulary checklist. In this section, there are 396 different words in 19 different categories (sound effects and animal sounds, animal names, vehicles, toys, food and drink, clothing, body parts, furniture and rooms, small household items, outside things and places to go, people, games and routines, action words, words about time, descriptive words, pronouns, question words, prepositions and locations, and quantifiers). Specifically, I am going to be looking at the difference between comprehending and producing certain words, and trying to establish whether the complexity of a word determines if it is both understood and spoken or just understood. 

The first step in doing this was to type out each of the words into an excel spreadsheet, which was extremely tedious but a good exercise for improving typing speed (at least that's what I told myself). I then made columns for "Comprehends" and "Produces" and filled them out, with a 1 in each column if the survey indicated that Quince could comprehends/produce each word, and a 0 if he could not. I did not include the signing option as he doesn't sign anything beyond "all done" and "more". I'm planning on further categorizing each word by whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic and whether or not it contains a cluster (two or more consecutive vowels). Hopefully, these categories will allow me to determine the complexity of each word, so that when I analyze this spreadsheet, I will be able to see if there is a correlation between complexity and lack of production. 

On Wednesday, I once again took Quince swimming for the last hour of ABA. Admittedly, I'm not really sure why we bring his therapist along instead of simply ending his session early, since I am the only one who gets in the water with him. We did some more speech work, similar to last week, but at the pool near his therapy location, Quince is limited to a small, shallow rectangle of the pool, which is very distracting since he always tries to escape into the lap lanes. Afterwards, we went to speech, where he was unfortunately pretty unfocused. Still, it was interesting to see how his therapists manage to keep his attention on how they are forming words.

I spent most of Thursday working on the spreadsheet of Quince's CDI and practicing phonetics at ASU. Also, Dr. Ingram sent me an article that he cowrote with his graduate student. It analyzes the daily speech diary of a child with language delay (kept by the mother). This is pretty relevant because I've been considering doing this for Quince to keep track of exactly what words he says, but it seems like a lot of work and I'm not with him all the time.

Sorry, I'm pretty sure that's the third time I've forgotten to get a video of Quince at speech. I'll try to remember for next week, but to be honest, at this point it's probably a lost cause.