Diagnosing Dysarthria in Adults: A New Speech Assessment Method for Polish, English, and Spanish

Izabela Gatkowska proposes a new SPEECH ASSESSMENT METHOD (SAM), grounded in her clinical experience with dysarthria, awareness of diagnostically important features, and the practical need to confine logopedic examination to tasks diagnostically most important and maximally tolerable by the patient. When diligently applied, the new SAM allows the diagnostician to identify overlapping dysarthric symptoms in greater detail and, when repeated, analyze their dynamics over time. The point of departure for the current study is an analysis of the speech impairments observed in Polish adult neurological patients. Rooted in language, developed and tested in a neurological clinic, this original method of diagnosing dysarthric speech disorders shall be applicable for linguists, psychologists, and clinicians who work with patients speaking Polish, English, or Spanish. Dysarthria, after all, is a neurodegeneratively-conditioned speech disorder whose diagnosis is independent of the patient’s mother tongue.