WHAT FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT CAN CONTRIBUTE TO SETTING GOALS FOR APHASIA THERAPY

The rehabilitation of communicative effectiveness has developed into one of the main concerns in aphasia treatment. Development of effective intervention programmes is dependent on rehabilitation evaluation. Standard assessment of neurolinguistic deficits does not account for communicative effectiveness. Improved scores on standard aphasia tests therefore have limited relevance to improved functional communication. Assessment of functional impairments can contribute to aphasia therapy by developing reliable and valid instruments for the evaluation of communicative adequacy. A recently developed instrument for measuring verbal communicative adequacy in terms of the comprehensibility of the message to the listener is presented. An analysis of the assessed communicative abilities of aphasic patients should expand our knowledge about the nature of and processes involved in communicative effectiveness. It is therefore argued that functional assessment can contribute to the search for adequate means and realistic goals in the treatment of aphasic patients. The results of a qualitative analysis of verbal communicative behaviour of aphasic patients is presented, which illustrates the effectiveness of aphasic communication despite their language deficits. It could be shown that even if the informational content of the messages is rather poor, aphasic patients bring across at least the most central elements of the message. © 1990, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.