Professional and family understanding of impaired communication

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Abstract
This paper examines the contrast between professional and family understanding of impaired communication as well as relatives' claims to comprehend minimal or unintelligible language. The performance of a young head injury victim on the expression section of the Frenchay Aphasia Screening Test (FAST) was video‐recorded and played back to a group of rehabilitation specialists and researchers and to the patient's parents. Neither the professionals nor the parents were shown the stimulus card, although one of the professionals had prior knowledge of it. Whereas none of the professionals was able to understand any of the patient's utterances the parents were able to comprehend most of what she said with just one playback of the video‐recording. The formal assessment by the patient's speech therapist and her ratings of the patient on a series of Likert scales were compared with the assessment and ratings by the patient's parents. While there was agreement concerning the patient's abilities at word finding, understanding of others and reading, there was disagreement about the patient's expressive abilities, prosody and writing abilities. It was concluded that relatives' claims to understand minimal or unintelligible language were not without foundation and that their contrasting views about the patient's abilities should not be dismissed. The implications of this for the rehabilitation of impaired communication and for sociolinguistic models of language acquisition are briefly discussed.