A multidisciplinary assessment of children with severe language disorder

Abstract

This study presents results from a multidisciplinary assessment of ten Swedish children with severe language disorder, aged 4;4–10;0. The children underwent an extensive medical examination. They were also tested by a clinical child psychologist. A thorough neurolinguistic examination was done as well as detailed linguistic analyses of the children's speech production. The results of our study revealed few links between medical findings and findings in other areas. One exception regards the outcome of the neurolinguistic, the linguistic and audiological assessments, where a possible link between auditory comprehension deficits and certain phonological and syntactic features are discussed. The authors suggest that detailed case studies are the only way at present to elucidate crucial individual differences in language disordered children, in particular in children with severe language disorders. In the future we hope that such studies may increase the knowledge on which typologies of such children can be based and to help us develop more adequate and effective means of intervention.