A follow-up report of German kindergarten children and preschoolers with expressive developmental language disorder

Abstract

The paper summarizes the language profile of a group of 25 monolingual German speaking children originally diagnosed as expressive developmental language disordered during the preschool period at a University Speech-Language-Hearing Clinic (mean chronological age: 4:11 years). These subjects are followed up some 2-6 years after initial diagnosis and were compared with a match group of control children. Nonverbal intelligence, psycholinguistic abilities and language development were assessed with standardized tests at follow-up in elementary school age (mean chronological age: 8:7 years). The nonverbal intelligence in both samples was average. At follow-up evaluation 52 per cent of the clinical sample still presented mild phonological disorders and 42 per cent language impairments. The main characteristics were deficiencies in automatic and sequential processes of language usage (sequential auditory memory of digits, syntactic imitation, auditory closure), in the forming of morphological structures, in the syntactic production including the correction of inconsistent sentences. These results demonstrate a significant difference in language functioning between the two groups. So the effect that a former language disorder group perform more poorly than the match control comparison group holds up in a German speaking population. This fact supports in some way a neurobiological foundation of this developmental disorder rather than an environmental one.

Key Words:

• language development disorder, child, preschool, follow-up-study, psychometric tests