CSD
2230
Child Language Disorders
- Disorders of Content - children who talk easily and readily
but who say nothing.
- Content refers to the expression of an individual's
knowledge of objects, relations between and among objects, and
relation between and among events. In some instances, children
have been reported to have fairly well developed form/use
interactions in contrast to poorly developed content.
- Content development affects:
- Understanding of words
- Development of meaning
- Box 2-1: Utterances do not make sense.
- These children produce complex syntactic and
morphological structures, are fluent and articulate, and
often produce contingent responses during a conversation.
The problem is their often are inappropriate or do not make
sense. Such behavior indicates a dissociation between
language and cognition.
- Box 2-2: Cocktail party speech
- Many hydrocephalic children have been characterized as
hyperverbal with "cocktail party speech." Cocktail party
speech is an example of well developed form (well-developed
articulation, intonation, and stress patterns) that is used
for social interactions but has weak conceptual
meaning.
- Disorders of Form - children who have difficulty learning the
rules for forming words and sentences.
- Form refers to the conventional linguistic system used to
code the content of language. It includes the sounds and rules
for combining sounds in a spoken language (or the hand
configurations, movements and place, as well as the rules for
combining in sign language), the description of different types
of lexical items that can appear in a language (nouns, verbs),
the rules for combining lexical items into simple and complex
sentences, as well as the inflections that can be added to
words.
- Primary difficulties in sentence structure (word order)
& grammatical morphemes, verb tense present progressive
(ing), plurals
- Boxes 2-3 and 2-4
- present dialogues that illustrate a primary weakness in
knowledge of linguistic form for coding ideas of the world,
but well developed ideas of the world that are communicated
in many contexts for many functions.
- Word finding difficulty that is occasionally observed in
children and often reported in adult aphasia is another
disruption in the interaction between form and content. Such
children circumlocute and have difficulty recalling the form
that represents the content that they wished to
express.
- Examples in Box X-1 and X-2
- Word finding difficulty that is another disruption in
the interaction between form and content. Such children
circumlocute or talk around the idea they are trying to
communicate, having difficulty in recalling the form that
represents what they are trying to say. Use is well
integrated with content, but the form for representing
content is not available. The major problem with these
example is with the linguistic dimension of language; both
the conceptual and interactional dimensions are intact.
- Disorders of Use - children who talk a lot but are not
successful in communication exchanges.
- Language use refers to the use of language for different
goals or functions, the use of information from the context to
determine what we say in order to reach goals and the use of
language in the initiation, termination, and maintenance of
interactions with people.
- Difficulty receiving and/or interpreting conversational
cues
- Problems with nonlinguistic interactions (reciprocal eye
gaze)
- Initiation of verbal interactions
- Boxes 2-5 and 2-6
- Children use language primarily for intrapersonal
functions rather than interpersonal functions. Be aware that
these behaviors must be considered in terms of frequency
with which they appear in the child's daily behavior. George
(box 2-5) uses language more frequently for intrapersonal
functions; they talk about something that is out of context
and either ramble repetitively or tangentially associate
ideas without regard for the listener.
- Example X-4 and X-5
- These examples show children's use of language that is
more often intrapersonal than interpersonal; they talk about
something that is out of context and either ramble
(repetitively or tangentially associate) ideas without
regard for the listener. It is the frequency of these
instances and the frequency of intrapersonal communications
that make such language different in use from that of the
child's peer. Other children with disruptions in use rarely
verbalize even if questioned or prodded. When prodded into
speaking, their productions indicate a greater knowledge of
the code than their general use would suggest.
