The Communicative Performance Measure （２）

Purpose and background of CPM

The purpose of CPM is to interview clients of speech-language pathological services, i.e., persons with speech disorders and their main communication partners, adopting two scales: comprehensibility and degree of satisfaction with comprehensibility.  CPM also aims to clarify the difficulties that clients feel and how they change.

Comprehensibility is defined as the extent to which a listener understands utterances produced by a speaker in a communication context, and it has been used as a rating scale for speakers of English as a second language and individuals with hearing impairment(Yorkston et al., 1996).

Yorkston et al. discussed the importance of the concept of comprehensibility in the assessment and treatment of dysarthria and argued that from the standpoint of supporting people with communication disorders, it is necessary to take an approach that includes not only intelligibility, which indicates the quality of the acoustic signal, but also all other factors independent of the acoustic signal (semantic and syntactic context, situational cues, compensatory strategies, etc.).  However, standardized measures of comprehensibility are still unavailable.

In their review of instruments for measuring communicative participation, Eadie et al.(2006) noted that currently published methods do not include an assessment of the activity level in ICF, which is essential for providing “client-centered” interventions.  They refer to the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM), and present an example of a method in which communication activities (partner, situation, etc.) that are important to the clients are specified as the target of evaluation, and the degrees of performance and satisfaction with communication in that specific situation are directly obtained from the client.  They suggest that it is desirable to develop a measurement method that considers these factors.

Yorkston KM, Strand, EA, Kennedy, MRT：Comprehensibility of Dysarthric Speech: Implications for Assessment and Treatment Planning. Am J Speech Lang Pathol, 5:55-66, 1996

Eadie TL, Yorkston KM, Klasner, ER, et al: Measuring communicative participation: a review of self-report instruments in speech-language pathology. Am J Speech Lang Pathol, 15 :307–320, 2006