Date of Graduation
5-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Communication Sciences and Disorders
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Communication Disorders and Occupational Therapy
Advisor/Mentor
Bowers, Andrew
Committee Member
Bowers, Lisa
Abstract
This case study compares two widely used language sample analysis (LSA) programs including the Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT) software and the Child Language Analysis (CLAN) software. The comparison aims to evaluate their effectiveness in analyzing the conversation-based language sample of a preschool-aged child who was reported at-risk for stuttering. A conversational language sample was collected from a four-year-old male at a local head-start program. The sample was transcribed and analyzed using both SALT and CLAN. SALT provided a user-friendly interface with clear results and a comparison to normative data. Some of these results included a maze and word percentage to assess fluency. CLAN offered a more detailed linguistic summary, including syntactic measures such as the Developmental Sentence Score (DSS) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn), but required more manual coding and training. Results suggest that SALT may be more accessible for clinical use due to its intuitive design, while CLAN may be better suited for research contexts with researchers that have time to work with the more advanced software. This study aims to examine the strengths and limitations of both software and how practical these assessment tools are for clinicians assessing clients with a potential fluency disorder.
Keywords
SALT, CLAN, language sampling analysis (LSA), disfluency, preschool, stuttering
Citation
Brown, A. G. (2025). A Comparative Analysis of SALT and CLAN in the Context of Analyzing Disfluencies in Preschool-Age Children Who Stutter. Communication Disorders and Occupational Therapy Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cdotuht/7
