Flu-ID Aphasia (Gordon & Clough, 2024)
Purpose: Assessing fluency in aphasia is diagnostically important for determining aphasia type and severity and therapeutically important for determining appropriate treatment targets. However, wide variability in the measures and criteria used to assess fluency, as revealed by a recent survey of clinicians (Gordon & Clough, 2022), results in poor reliability. Furthermore, poor specificity in many fluency measures makes it difficult to identify the underlying impairments. Here, we introduce the Flu-ID Aphasia, an evidence-based tool that provides a more informative method of assessing fluency by capturing the range of behaviors that can affect the flow of speech in aphasia.
Method: The development of the Flu-ID was based on prior evidence about factors underlying fluency (Clough & Gordon, 2020; Gordon & Clough, 2020) and clinical perceptions about the measurement of fluency (Gordon & Clough, 2022). Clinical utility is maximized by automated counting of fluency behaviors in an Excel template. Reliability is maximized by outlining thorough guidelines for transcription and coding. Eighteen narrative samples representing a range of fluency were coded independently by the authors to examine the Flu-ID’s utility, reliability, and validity.
Results: Overall reliability was very good, with point-to-point agreement of 86% between coders. Ten of the 12 dimensions showed good to excellent reliability. Validity analyses indicated that Flu-ID scores were similar to clinician ratings on some dimensions, but differed on others. Possible reasons and implications of the discrepancies are discussed, along with opportunities for improvement.
Conclusions: The Flu-ID assesses fluency in aphasia using a consistent and comprehensive set of measures and semi-automated procedures to generate individual fluency profiles. The profiles generated in the current study illustrate how similar ratings of fluency can arise from different underlying impairments. Supplemental materials include an analysis template, extensive guidelines for transcription and coding, a completed sample, and a quick reference guide.
Supplemental Material S1. Excel template to be used for transcribing and analyzing speech samples.
Supplemental Material S2. Guidelines for the use of the Flu-ID Aphasia.
Supplemental Material S3. Short reference sheet for the use of the Flu-ID Aphasia.
Supplemental Material S4. Sample completed transcript on the Excel template.
Supplemental Material S5. Illustration of the clinical ratings from Gordon and Clough (2022) for the 9 pairs of PwA used in the current study to develop the Flu-ID tool.
Supplemental Material S6. Demographic and stroke information about the 18 PwA examined using the Flu-ID.
Supplemental Material S7. Illustration of the relationships between clinician ratings (Gordon & Clough, 2022) and dimension or domain scores from the current study.
Supplemental Material S8. Illustration of the similarities and differences between clinician ratings and dimension scores for two sample PwA.
Gordon, J. K., & Clough, S. (2024). The Flu-ID: A new evidence-based method of assessing fluency in aphasia. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 33(6), 2972–2990. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_AJSLP-23-00424
