Assessment of Dysarthria in Adults

Assessment of motor speech disorders is conducted for many purposes, including description, differential diagnosis, management planning and outcome assessment. A number of tools are available to support assessment efforts and each are more or less suited for one of these purposes. This course will review these purposes and tools broadly and then focus more specifically on perceptual assessment for the purpose of differential diagnosis. Case examples will be employed throughout the discussion to allow participants to apply the concepts presented. Participant questions and involvement will be highly encouraged.

Prof. Dr. Heather M. Clark, Ph.D. CCC-SLP BC-ANCDS

Dr. Heather Clark is chair of the Division of Speech Pathology and Associate Professor in the College of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. Her work with childhood apraxia of speech has been strongly influenced by her mentor, Dr. Edy Strand and her colleagues Dr. Ruth Stoeckel and Ms. Becky Baas. In her role as Consultant at Mayo Clinic, she has the opportunity to assess children and adults from across the U.S. and the world, seeking to better understand the relative contribution of language, learning, and motor speech impairments to a patient’s communication impairments. She has published and presented dozens of articles, book chapters, conference abstracts, university and advanced courses on pediatric motor speech disorders. She is an award-winning researcher and teacher, fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and grandmother to Valya, a very sweet bilingual toddler.

Course Outcomes

• Elicit behaviors sensitive to neurologic impairment.
• Develop a differential diagnosis based on perceptual speech features and supported by nonspeech findings.

Program Flow

• Purposes of dysarthria assessment
• Dysarthria assessment for differential diagnosis
• History
• Speech Functions
• Nonspeech and Speech-like functions
• Beyond differential diagnosis
• Instrumental measures
• Intelligibility
• Case studies​