Who shall be Called Language Disordered? Some Reflections and One Perspective

Abstract

This paper discusses some issues involved in identifying children who have language problems. The perspective taken is that (a) the goal of identification must be clearly distinguished from other goals of assessment; (b) identification of children with language disorders is better based on language performance than on inferences about the language knowledge that underlies this performance; (c) language performance must be sampled in more than one context, including, for purposes of identification, contexts that stress the language system; (d) the standards of expectations for comparing performance and determining differences must be explicit; (e) standards used to determine differences are better based on the performance of chronological-age peers than on the performance of children with similar mental abilities; and (f) children who do not evidence poor language performance but are considered at risk for language-related problems should be distinguished from children who demonstrate poor language skills.

Prevalence of Specific Language Impairment in Kindergarten Children

“…Stark and Tallal (1981) and have argued that the language achievements of children with SLI should fall below expectations based upon nonverbal IQ. Recently, however, several authors (Aram, Morris, & Hall, 1993;Bishop, 1994;Cole, Dale, & Mills, 1990;Lahey, 1990) have questioned the value of a nonverbal discrepancy criterion on both theoretical and methodological grounds, and presented empirical evidence that this discrepancy criterion has little prognostic or etiologic utility.…”

“…In fact, the most explicit diagnostic standard for SLI developed by Stark and Tallal (1981) required that there be a CA discrepancy as well as a nonverbal discrepancy. In response to her concerns about nonverbal mental age referencing, Lahey (1990) recommended that chronological age be used as the principal basis for judging language expectations in children.…”

Desempenho gramatical com crianças em desenvolvimento normal e com distúrbio específico de linguagem

“…Muitos estudos têm ressaltado a falta de um bom padrão referente às habilidades lingüísticas infantis e de instrumentos de avaliação que possam relacionar o desempenho das habilidades de linguagem das crianças às teorias existentes ou aos modelos descritivos do conhecimento lingüístico infantil, a fim de se realizar um diagnóstico em alteração de desenvolvimento da linguagem baseado num parâmetro preciso de comparação (STARK e TALLAL, 1981;LAHEY, 1990;WATKINS et al, 1995;RICE, 1997;RICE, WEXLER e HERSHENBERGER, 1998).…”

Dimensión De La Forma Del Lenguaje Oral De Los Habitantes Del Resguardo Indígena De San Andrés De Sotavento Sincelejo - Colombia.

“…Para Lahey (1), el lenguaje es el conocimiento de un código que permite representar ideas del mundo por medio de un sistema convencional de señales arbitrarias; asimismo, Owens (2), lo define como un código compartido para la representación de conceptos mediante símbolos arbitrarios y reglas que los gobiernan. Desde lo expuesto por Acosta et al (3) hay tres dimensiones del lenguaje: estructural, funcional y comportamental, y Gallardo y Gallego (4) las complementan como: estructural (fonología y sintaxis), funcional (semántica) y comportamental (pragmática).…”