RETARDED LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT by Dr.JORDI MAS

Retarded oral language development has frequently been suggested as a significant contributor to dyslexia. Poor readers often have a very limited vocabulary and use an even smaller part of that vocabulary in everyday speech. Their grammatical constructions are linguistacally immature. Children with retarded oral language development can usually function adequately in normal speaking situations, but they are easily confused by uncommon usages of the language. The rhyming patterns of poetry present difficulties, for example: many times the children understand the meaning of poems, but they cannot easily replace a word with another rhyming word. Teir limited language abilities do not permit them to play with language or the sounds of language.Thus, these children may have trouble segmenting and rearranging language sounds when they attempt to speak in pig latin.
Conversely, general language disability, especially among older children, might be the result of inadequate reading abilities. The child who cannot read properly could be expected to acquire vocabulary, general information and mature grammatical constructions at a slow rate. The most widely held interpretation, however, says dyslexia isthe final, crippling manifestation of an overall language disability. Most of the evidence supports this conclusion.

Additional support for a language-based origin of dyslexia comes from studies in wich verbal and nonverbal stimuli were presented to groups of normal and reading impaired children. In one study, good and poor readers were show several cards one at time. Printed on each card whas either a verbal syimulus (nonsense syllable) or a nonverbal stimulus (nonsense design or photographed face).

Four of the stimuli kept reappearing, but otherwise the stimuli were different. the children's task was to tell if they had already seen each stimulus as it was presented. The result: normal and impaired readers showed no significant difference in ability to recall photographed faces or nonsense desings. However, the normal readers were far better at recalling the recurrence of the nonsense syllables. It appears that the normal readers' language ability permitted them to process the verbal information more efficiently.

Comentarios a Jordi Mąs en jorgemas@intercom.es

Atrįs įs