SLP Social and Cognitive Communication 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A patient with moderate TBI demonstrates confabulation during social conversation. This is BEST addressed by:
- Increasing speech rate targets
- Providing external cues and reality orientation strategies (Correct answer)
- Drilling phoneme discrimination tasks
- Reducing syntactic complexity in input
Correct answer: Providing external cues and reality orientation strategies
Confabulation, producing false memories without intent to deceive, is managed through external memory supports, structured questioning, and reality orientation to promote accurate communication.
Question 2: Joint attention, the coordinated focus of two people on a shared object or event, is considered foundational for which later skill?
- Phonological awareness
- Language and social communication development (Correct answer)
- Fluency shaping
- Voice projection
Correct answer: Language and social communication development
Joint attention is a prelinguistic social-communicative skill that predicts vocabulary growth, conversational development, and social reciprocity.
Question 3: When an SLP targets 'gaze behavior' in a social skills group, the PRIMARY goal is to:
- Improve visual acuity
- Teach use of eye contact to signal turn-taking and attention (Correct answer)
- Reduce nystagmus
- Train ocular motor tracking
Correct answer: Teach use of eye contact to signal turn-taking and attention
Gaze in social communication signals engagement, conversational turns, and emotional connection — the SLP targets its pragmatic function, not the visual mechanism.
Question 4: Which test assesses both verbal and nonverbal social communication skills across multiple contexts and is normed for ages 9-adult?
- CELF-5 Pragmatics Profile
- CASL-2
- TOPL-2 (Test of Pragmatic Language) (Correct answer)
- EVT-3
Correct answer: TOPL-2 (Test of Pragmatic Language)
The TOPL-2 evaluates pragmatic language use across physical settings, audiences, and topics using picture-based scenarios, with norms from age 9 through adult.
Question 5: A clinician notices a client with right hemisphere syndrome laughs at inappropriate times and misinterprets facial expressions. The MOST appropriate intervention target is:
- Phonological decoding accuracy
- Affective prosody recognition and facial affect interpretation (Correct answer)
- Sentence repetition span
- Consonant cluster reduction
Correct answer: Affective prosody recognition and facial affect interpretation
Right hemisphere damage disrupts emotional prosody and facial affect recognition; targeting these improves social communication accuracy and appropriateness.
Question 6: In the context of SLP intervention, 'perspective-taking' is defined as:
- Viewing a picture from different physical angles
- Inferring another person's thoughts, feelings, and intentions (Correct answer)
- Comparing speaker and listener vocabulary sizes
- Adjusting loudness based on room acoustics
Correct answer: Inferring another person's thoughts, feelings, and intentions
Perspective-taking (mentalizing) involves attributing mental states to others and is foundational to empathic, adaptive social communication.
Question 7: Which of the following behaviors is a positive indicator of social communication progress in a child with ASD?
- Increased stereotyped motor movements
- Spontaneous initiation of comments to share interest with peers (Correct answer)
- Greater reliance on scripted routines in all settings
- Reduced eye contact during greeting routines
Correct answer: Spontaneous initiation of comments to share interest with peers
Spontaneous comment initiations to share interest reflect emerging joint attention and communicative intentionality — key social communication milestones.
SLP Social and Cognitive Communication 4
A patient with moderate TBI demonstrates confabulation during social conversation.
This is BEST addressed by: