A case of developmental language impairment in adolescence and adulthood

Abstract

We report the case of a 19-year-old female with a history of developmental language impairment. The subject's performance in accessing word forms, lexical-semantics, syntactic abilities, and text comprehension was diagnosed. The results show a persisting multilevel impairment, especially with non-canonical and subordinated sentences, morphology, and narratives. Nevertheless a clear potential in compensating her difficulties for communicative purposes could be observed. There are only very few descriptions of German-speaking subjects with persisting language disorder. Our results underline previous findings of symptoms persisting into adolescence and adulthood. The symptomatology may be covert on superficial observation but is still of relevance to the participation of the individuals concerned. Further research on identifying language-specific clinical markers is needed to meet the requirements of this group of clients.

Key words::

• Adolescents
• adults
• developmental language impairment

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.