AJSLP Clinical Focus “The Caterpillar”: A Novel Reading Passage for Assessment of Motor Speech Disorders Rupal Patel, a Kathryn Connaghan, a Diana Franco, a Erika Edsall, a Dory Forgit, a Laura Olsen, a Lianna Ramage, a Emily Tyler, a and Scott Russell b Purpose: A review of the salient characteristics of motor speech disorders and common assessment protocols re- vealed the need for a novel reading passage tailored specifi- cally to differentiate between and among the dysarthrias (DYSs) and apraxia of speech (AOS). Method: “The Caterpillar” passage was designed to provide a contemporary, easily read, contextual speech sample with specific tasks (e.g., prosodic contrasts, words of increasing length and complexity) targeted to inform the assessment of motor speech disorders. Twenty-two adults, 15 with DYS or AOS and 7 healthy controls (HC), were recorded reading “The Caterpillar” passage to demonstrate its utility in exam- ining motor speech performance. Conclusion: Analysis of performance across a subset of segmental and prosodic variables illustrated that “The Caterpillar” passage showed promise for extracting individual profiles of impairment that could augment current assessment protocols and inform treatment planning in motor speech disorders. Key Words: motor speech evaluation, reading passage, contextual speech T he motor speech evaluation is critical to identifying the presence of, differentiating between, and rating the severity of impairment. Observations based on this assessment provide guidance for which aspects of speech production may be most amenable to treatment and effective for enhancing communication. Speech production is exam- ined at various levels of complexity, from nonsense syllables to words to sentences to connected speech, using a reading from a standard passage and elicited through picture de- scription or conversation. Specific tasks used to examine speech motor programming and execution include maximum phonation time, diadochokinetic rates (alternating/sequential motion rates), isolated sound and syllable production, words in simple and complex syllable structures, words of in- creasing length, automatic/frequent words or phrases (e.g., days of the week, counting), and contextual speech (Duffy, 2005; Freed, 2012). Of the speech evaluation tasks, contextual speech is the most useful for observing the integrated function of all components of speech (see, e.g., Bunton, Kent, Duffy, Rosenbek, & Kent, 2007; Duffy, 2005). The reading passage provides a sample that can be compared to tokens gathered through syllable and word repetition tasks. Ideally, the passage should afford a controlled and repeatable speaking task to tax the speech production system and aid in differ- ential diagnosis. For the researcher, knowing the context within which speech sounds are produced and the nature of the errors made, as well as examining the suprasegmental structure of utterances, may provide insight into deficits at varying levels of speech production. A variety of reading passages have been reported in the literature, yet “My Grandfather” (Van Riper, 1963) is anec- dotally the most well known and used. This passage, how- ever, is not particularly well suited for examining speech motor skills that differentiate among motor speech disorders. In fact, Van Riper described the passage as “useful for a quick survey of the student’ s (client’ s) ability to produce correct speech sounds” (Van Riper, 1963, p. 484). The his- torical roots of using this passage in motor speech evaluation perhaps stem from Darley, Aronson, and Brown’ s (1969a, 1969b) seminal work on the perceptual characteristics of dysarthria, in which they used a variant of the passage called “The Grandfather Passage” (see Reilly & Fisher, 2012, for a description of the genesis of the passage). Given that the purpose of a reading passage is to allow researchers to ob- serve the integrated performance of the speech production system, best clinical practice would support embedding some of the syllable and word repetition tasks of the motor speech evaluation within the reading passage, to observe differences a Northeastern University, Boston, MA b Grady Memorial Hospital, Atlanta, GA Correspondence to Rupal Patel: r.patel@neu.edu Editor: Carol Scheffner Hammer Associate Editor: Julie Liss Received October 28, 2011 Revision received March 13, 2012 Accepted June 4, 2012 DOI: 10.1044/1058-0360(2012/11-0134) American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology • Vol. 22 • 1–9 • February 2013 • A American Speech-Language-Hearing Association 1