SLP - Speech-Language Pathology Receptive and Expressive Language Questions and Answers

Question 1

A 4-year-old child is evaluated and found to understand complex directions (e.g., "Go get the big truck from your room and put it in the blue box"), identify hundreds of vocabulary words receptively, and comprehend short stories.
However, the child's verbal output is limited to one- or two-word phrases such as "more juice" and "car go." This clinical profile most strongly suggests:

Accepted Answer

An isolated expressive language disorder

Answer

A global language delay

Answer

Childhood apraxia of speech

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An isolated receptive language disorder

Question 2

Which of the following clinical tasks is most specifically designed to assess a patient's receptive syntax?

Accepted Answer

Requiring the patient to point to the picture that matches a sentence like, "The girl is being chased by the dog."

Answer

Asking the patient to describe a picture scene in detail.

Answer

Having the patient repeat a series of increasingly long and complex sentences.

Answer

Requesting the patient to name as many animals as they can in 60 seconds.

Question 3

A 70-year-old client who has had a left-hemisphere stroke presents with speech that is non-fluent, telegraphic, and effortful. He primarily uses content words and omits many function words. While he shows significant frustration, he is able to follow most commands and understands yes/no questions accurately. This pattern of deficits is most consistent with a primary impairment in:

Accepted Answer

Expressive language

Answer

Auditory processing

Answer

Pragmatic language

Answer

Receptive language

Question 4

A school-aged child demonstrates difficulty understanding idioms (e.g., "it's raining cats and dogs"), grasping multiple-meaning words, and identifying the main idea of a passage read aloud. These challenges are indicative of a deficit in which specific area of language?

Accepted Answer

Receptive semantics

Answer

Expressive syntax

Answer

Receptive phonology

Answer

Expressive morphology

Question 5

An SLP is assessing a 5-year-old who frequently provides tangentially related or irrelevant answers to questions. To differentiate between a primary receptive language deficit (not understanding the question) and an expressive language deficit (unable to formulate a response), which of the following actions is most informative?

Accepted Answer

Asking the child to follow a series of multi-step commands without requiring a verbal response.

Answer

Calculating the child's Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) from a spontaneous language sample.

Answer

Administering a standardized articulation test to assess speech sound production.

Answer

Requesting that the child tell a story based on a wordless picture book.

Question 6

An SLP is writing an Individualized Education Program (IEP) goal for a student with an expressive language disorder. Which of the following goals best targets expressive syntax?

Accepted Answer

The student will use conjunctions (e.g., 'and', 'but', 'because') to combine two simple sentences in 8 out of 10 opportunities.

Answer

The student will follow three-step, related directions with 80% accuracy.

Answer

The student will identify 20 new vocabulary words by pointing to pictures.

Answer

The student will correctly answer 'wh-' questions about a short story with 90% accuracy.