Specific language impairment as systemic developmental disorders

[en] Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a disorder characterised by slow, abnormal language development. Most children with this disorder do not present any other cognitive or neurological deficits. There are many different pathological developmental profiles and switches from one profile to another often occur. An alternative would be to consider SLI as a generic name covering three developmental language disorders: developmental verbal dyspraxia, linguistic dysphasia, and pragmatic language impairment. The underlying cause of SLI is unknown and the numerous studies on the subject suggest that there is no single cause. We suggest that SLI is the result of an abnormal development of the language system, occurring when more than one part of the system fails, thus blocking the system’s natural compensation mechanisms. Since compensation also hinders linguistic evaluation, one possibility for diagnosis and remediation control is to assess basic cognitive abilities by non-linguistic means whenever possible. Neurological plausible bases for language and language development should also be taken into account to offer new hypotheses and research issues for future work on SLI.

Research Center/Unit :

CNCC

Disciplines :

Theoretical & cognitive psychology
Languages & linguistics

Author, co-author :

Parisse, Christophe

Maillart, Christelle ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences cognitives > Logopédie clinique

Language :

English

Title :

Specific language impairment as systemic developmental disorders

Publication date :

March 2009

Journal title :

Journal of Neurolinguistics

ISSN :

0911-6044

Publisher :

Pergamon Press - An Imprint of Elsevier Science

Volume :

Issue :

Pages :

109-122

Peer reviewed :

Peer Reviewed verified by ORBi

Available on ORBi :

since 27 January 2009

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