The nature of language problem in Bangladeshi children with cerebral palsy: an observation using neurolinguistic approach

Abstract

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the leading cause of childhood disability affecting function and development. The objective of the study was to look into the language problems in Bangladeshi children with CP on the basis of neurolinguistic approach and was conducted during the period of April 2014 to December 2014 at the Department of Linguistics, University of Dhaka among children aged between 3 to 18 years. In the study, a total of 10 children with CP were enrolled purposively from two tertiary care hospitals in Dhaka (Children Development Centre of Sir Salimullah Medical College and Mitford Hospital and National Institute of Mental Health). The mean±SD age was 8.9±4.8 years. Male was predominant (60.0%). History of prolonged labour was 100%, and home attended by untrained birth attendants in 70.0%. The 90.0% of the children understood simple meaningful sentences using two words. The children were unable to understand complex sentences. The 80.0% children did not want to play or make friendship with other children; 40.0% did not understand others’ speech, 50.0% did not express their own speech, and 10.0% did not understand & express their own speech. All the children had deep thong articulation changed to mono thong in case of semi vowel articulation. In case of history of delayed crying at birth, phoneme omission occurred when the children tried to articulate any word. To the best of knowledge, this was the first study done on the neurolinguistic approach in Bengali children, but the limitation of the study were that it was with small sample size, city based and short duration. Therefore, generalization of the results would be difficult. Further studies using larger sample would be better to visualize the extent of the issue in order to insert the children with CP in their social context and to give them quality of life.Mediscope Vol. 5, No. 1: Jan 2018, Page 22-27