What kind of speech test would cover this?

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My oldest mumbles. He runs his words together to the point that his conversation level speech is incomprehensible. At the single word level he has perfect articulation, so every time he has a speech eval, they end up saying that his speech is great. His dad basically can't understand him at all, and while after several repeats I can usually figure out what he is saying in person, I can't understand anything on the phone. No one else that speaks to him on the phone can understand him either. If he continues talking like this then he won't be able to make appointments over the phone, visit long distance relatives by voice call, or even order food. I know it's a small thing, but we're coming up on the IEP meeting for him, and from what he was saying the speech tester said to him during the eval, I think this is going to be the same kind of result again. "He has a great vocabulary, he knows most idioms (we've worked on those a lot), he can articulate all sounds"--and ignore the conversation level breakdown.

Surely there is some test that specifically tests the functioning of conversation level articulation

Look up speech cluttering and see if this is what your son does

http://www.stutteringhelp.org/cluttering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluttering
http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad8/papers/dewey8.html
http://www.asha.org/Publications/leader ... /f031118a/

I like the last article best

OMGosh. My son does this. I had no idea there was a name for it.

You can also ask for his articulation goals to be measured "in a sentence" and "in telling a story".

Thank you for those articles! One of them pointed out that clutterers are often perfectly intelligible when they are in a short testing situation, because they are thinking about their speech, and that is definitely him. I also didn't realize that mazing was a component of it. If you've ever read my posts, you know I am very guilty of that particular problem! Although, I normally keep it under control in every day speech by just not talking that much, or only discussing the topic at hand. Sometimes, I'll trap my husband and just talk at him, all the random, mazes of stuff wandering around in my head for an hour or so and then I can keep a lid on it for a few more weeks. He's good about just listening and not pointing that it really doesn't make much sense to jump from topic to topic.

As far as that goes, I don't think my son is as disorganized as I am. He has the typical ASD ability to monologue on his special interest for hours if he finds someone too polite to tell him enough already. But he has that fast rate of speaking that causes his articulation to breakdown, and the monotone and volume control prosody issues that just make listening to him hard. It's interesting that one of the last things he was treated for by a speech therapist was stuttering. Before that was severe phonological disorder. I guess it kind of makes sense that the issue is now cluttering, because it says that it often occurs with those others, but isn't noticed that much until the others are fixed, or that the first steps are to fix the others.

He does improve a bit when we tell him to slow down, but it is at the point where we are just getting on his nerves, and it never works for more than a few seconds to a minute. I think because he is so excited to share whatever it is he is thinking about, and he denies that he is hard to understand even when we repeat back what we think he has said.

I'll definitely bring this up at the meeting. It got snowed out yesterday, so I guess it has to be rescheduled.

you might also look up the word "Prosidy" and follow it around to other concepts.



my mother still tells me to slow down or modify my volume. and even upon immediate reflection, I still can't tell I was in error.
hopefully, you find some process that improves the problem. And if you do, feel free to pm me about the pursuit!

Has a speech-language pathologist taken a language sample? That's an informal method of assessment that can give insight to all sorts of language and speech issues. A good SLP should be doing more than just assessing articulation at the word level - at the very least he or she should be engaging your child in conversation during the evaluation. It's not uncommon for articulation to be good at the word level, and messy at the conversation level.

There are also articulation tests, such as the Goldman Fristoe-2, that assess articulation at the sentence level (by means of story retelling). While not really conversation level, it's more "natural" than simple word-level assessment.

All his teachers knew what I was talking about with the mumbling and running his words together so that he is hard to understand. I don't believe any of them have tried to talk to him on the phone to see how impossible that is. The only one at the table that hadn't heard any speech errors was the one who had done the speech testing! However, they all seemed to think that if he didn't have any underlying speech issues, that speech therapy wouldn't be that effective. That since he is capable of repeating himself often enough to make himself understood (and in person, it rarely takes more than three repeats to get it understandable, and it isn't 100% of the time that he does it more like maybe 60% rough guesstimate) that they want to keep reminding him to slow down and think about what he is saying and see how it sounds next year. I'd fight with them more, but what I read about cluttering is that the main thing that is worked on is underlying speech deficits and after that there are a few things they can try, but until he decides he has a problem, none of the other things that can be tried are very effective. So I guess we'll keep going as we were, except that all of his teachers have agreed to remind him to slow down and speak clearly. Maybe the united front will keep it fresh on his mind enough that he will.

I am pretty sure that the Goldman Fristoe is one they did. He's had a lot of speech tests over the years, so it's possible I am just remembering the name from before, but I don't think so.