Language development during the first years of its acquisition appears in a very irregular way. This can be seen in nursery schools, seeing how many children have quickly accessed the world of oral language without any difficulty, while others have serious problems in their learning.
Among the children who present difficulties in language acquisition, a group has been identified, the Specific Language Disorder (T.E.L.), a delay in the acquisition of language skills that appears without intellectual, sensory, motor, affective or neurological alterations.
Let's look at some aspects related to T.E.L., such as definition, diagnostic criteria, related factors, characteristics and intervention.
Definition of Specific Language Disorder
A characteristic of T.E.L. It is not defined by what it is, but rather by what it is not. This is because there is great variability between the behaviors and manifestations associated with this linguistic difficulty.
The T.E.L. it can vary both in the aspect of the language that is affected (in the sounds, grammar, vocabulary, use of language ...) and in the damaged modality (expressive language or comprehensive language)
The general trend is that the term T.E.L. It encompasses both language disorders of neurological origin and those related to rhythm and speed in language acquisition (for example, language delay)
However, from the point of view of speech therapy intervention, it is convenient to differentiate between Language Delay and T.E.L., since it allows for a finer adjustment of intervention strategies and facilitates the necessary educational response for children with language difficulties.
Criteria for diagnosing Specific Language Disorder
The child's language develops over a long period of time, and that makes it difficult to give diagnostic criteria.
Language assessment to determine the consistency or not of T.E.L. It is usually performed by using standardized language tests, passing a test to detect hearing problems, not presenting recent episodes of serous otitis media, not presenting neurological problems, absent malformations in the oral area, being able to perform mouth, tongue movements , jaws ... correct, etc.
From all this it follows that it is not easy to identify children with T.E.L.
Factors related to the appearance of Specific Language Disorder
The acquisition of children's language with T.E.L. It is delayed, and this despite receiving adequate linguistic stimulation, a normal ability to perceive language, a well-organized brain for learning and structures that allow articulate different speech sounds correctly.
It is suggested that T.E.L. It is associated with multifactorial problems, that is, the combination of a poorly structured family environment that presents deficiencies in linguistic stimuli either due to problems of the child, due to environmental causes or negative responses to the linguistic stimulation of the child by adults. (poor structuring of phrases, poor pronunciation of phonemes ...), as well as a family history of language delay.
However, it is not uncommon to often find certain discrepancies in the evolution of cognitive and linguistic development.
Characteristics of the Specific Language Disorder
Although children with T.E.L. They have all the prerequisites for language acquisition, the evidence seems to show that their learning presents certain difficulties.
- Phonological deficit: the alteration seems to occur more in the processes of auditory discrimination, affecting the mechanisms that deal with meaning (mental representation or concept; for example, the image of a bicycle) and the signifier (the sounds; for example, the chain of phonemes that constitute the word "bicycle"). They use strategies to perceive very immature sounds, coding words in terms of whole syllables, without the awareness that speech can be divided into smaller units.
- Morphosyntactic Deficit: There are serious limitations in the ability to perceive, process and develop rules that facilitate linguistic generalizations, a situation that leads to a grammatical system with enormous errors. For example, it is very difficult for them to use the determinant "la" for all those words of the feminine gender, although sometimes they use it well before a learned word.
- Lexicosemantic deficit: There are serious limitations in their vocabulary, since they acquire a smaller amount of known words compared to children of the same age, together with a limited understanding of vocabulary and difficulties in recovering words from memory.
- Pragmatic deficit: Problems are detected in the understanding of communicative acts, a circumstance that occurs when a child with T.E.L. does not respond adequately to a communicative demand (for example, asking him what he has done in school), for reasons such as the lack of understanding of the vocabulary used, a certain degree of confusion due to the length and / or complexity of the sentence, the use of a style indirectly in speech or simply because the child does not want to respond in the right direction (instead of saying what he has done at school, he tells us what happened in the last chapter of his favorite series of drawings).
Intervention in Specific Language Disorder
Two of the most commonly used techniques are molding (The child arrives by successive approximations to express a word or sentence. The adult systematically reinforces any approximation of the child to the target behavior. For example: we are playing the bubbles and the child wants more, but does not express it verbally. soon, the child says "ma" (or another sound). At that time, the adult reinforces blowing to blow bubbles while saying "Very good. More bubbles!") and Modeling (The adult acts as a model with the objective that the child imitates such a model to establish a certain verbal behavior or correct a previous error. For example: it is possible to hide objects. Once hidden, objects are “called” while searching so that the child imitates us).
It must be taken into account that the linguistic disorders of these children will facilitate the appearance of learning difficulties, problems in the development of reading comprehension skills and in the social and emotional fields.
Therefore, it is due collaborate with parents so much (to communicate better with your child), such as with the school (and thus try that the language difficulties of children with T.E.L. do not affect their emotional, school or social development). He Conclusion
For any other questions about this language disorder, do not hesitate to leave your comments.
