Table 1 Clinician consensus table of speech and language characteristics
Characteristic | Clinical features |
|---|---|
Word-finding difficulty | ● Reduction in content words, circumlocution, and false starts [19] ● Pauses while searching for words [12] ● Fluency (rate, phrase length, amount of hesitation) ● Revisions (repetitions of complete words or phrases/elaborations), and indefinite terms (fillers) |
Incoherence | ● Coherence is the orderly flow of information within discourse (graph features), and a marker of how well discourse is connected within words, sentences, and overall speech (local and global coherence) [20,21,22,23] ● Incoherence is characterized by disorganized speech, derailment or sudden topic shifts, tangentiality, flight of ideas, or word salad [13, 18, 24, 25]. |
Perseveration | ● Repetition of word or phrase even after the stimulus for the behavior (word or phrase) has been taken away [18, 26] ● Persistence of behavior (word or phrase) despite repeated failure ● Intrusion: inappropriate repetition of prior responses after intervening stimuli [27] |
Errors in Speech | ● Phonetic errors (omissions, additions, substitutions, distortions) [28] ● Stuttering [18] ● Sequences of phonemic approximation |