Special Language Difficulties During Childhood
Special language difficulties (also known as dysphasia) are spreading throughout the population. These problems always range from the most complex interference that prevents normal communication to simple language errors, such as those that confuse the letters R and L. However, most of these speech and language disorders occur in childhood, when development and learning are at their peak.
The child’s brain develops by tremendous leaps and bounds, along with the most complex cognitive functions, such as the main factor in the evolution of our species, namely speech and language. Our ability to communicate through different channels has vastly expanded the range of activities found within the reach of our humanity today.
Speech and language are a very complex skill that must be acquired and honed during childhood. At this stage, most language problems also arise and if left untreated, their effects begin to be reflected in adult life as well.
What are the specific language difficulties?
Speech and language disorders occur in children when there are difficulties or delays in their learning. Because cognitive skills do not develop in the same way in all people, this concept is used in cases where a child has particular difficulty learning language and speech.
While these specific language difficulties may jeopardize the learning of other skills, they represent a selective deficiency for a particular learning, not so much a global deficiency. The best-known example of these is dyslexia, which makes it difficult to read and write, even though the IQ itself remains within normal parameters.
Brain maturation and language development
Language development is gradual and depends on the proper development of neurons in the brain. At the age of two, the child takes its first steps in spontaneous language, which occurs simultaneously with the huge leaps in motor development, which in turn leads to the hypothesis of the simultaneous development of these two skills. This process coincides with an increase in myelination of nervous system cells.
For example, a six-month-old baby is already able to understand smiles thanks to his or her motor development and interactions. As another example, we could take a 5-year-old child whose motor development is already almost complete and who is able to perform more complex verbal tasks, such as telling his or her own age or repeating four-digit series.
How does early brain damage affect speech and language learning?
Early brain damage is usually the result of accidents. The first defect is due to the damage that results from the neural changes that underlie the nervous system damage . In the next stage of learning, abnormalities begin to appear, which in turn are due to this neural reorganization.
The plasticity of children’s brains allows for functional rearrangement, but it cannot eliminate the likelihood of developmental disorders that can be either diffuse or focal depending on the type of brain injury.
Dyslexia
Dyslexia, or special reading difficulty (or dyslexia), is a disorder that affects reading and writing due to the confusion of the order of words, syllables, and letters.
Dyslexia is one of the most common specific language difficulties. Dyslexia can be the result of difficulties in processing auditory information, which in turn suggests the origin of the problem of visual illustration. It is also interesting to note that the changes caused by dyslexia vary according to the writing system.
How can dyslexia be identified?
Children with dyslexia who have a specific learning disability have problems with a proper understanding of the language-related aspects that manifest themselves in writing and reading. Signs of these learning difficulties may include, for example:
- Lack of attention : tasks can require too much cognitive resources and this causes mental fatigue in the child, leading to problems with concentration.
- Lateral problems: difficulty distinguishing right from left as well as general difficulties in spatial perception.
- Difficulties in identifying and naming fingers, for example.
- Feelings of insecurity and stubbornness.
How to distinguish between dyslexia and dyscalculia?
Dyslexia does not have a particular deficiency in the recognition of numerical numbers, but is a problem of understanding abstract concepts related to language in general.
On the other hand, dyscalculia is the inability to work with numerical concepts. The main signs to determine dyscalculia are:
- Difficulty learning and remembering basic functions.
- Problems with proper character recognition and use.
- Head landing is impossible, making recourse to more rudimentary strategies such as finger counting necessary.
- Difficulty understanding numerical concepts such as “greater than”.
- Problems in presenting numbers in the abstract and spatial also cause difficulties in writing them.
Differences in special language difficulties and developmental disabilities
Specific language difficulties, regardless of redundancy, are developmental problems that occur only in the linguistic area and can affect other areas as well.
On the other hand, developmental disability is a global change in intellectual activity that is evident in the early stages of a child’s development through a lower-than-normal intellectual average.
Specific language difficulties: assessment and treatment
First, the assessment of a specific language difficulty is often carried out by a multidisciplinary team, which may consist of, for example, the following professionals:
- Speech Therapist: Responsible for defining the area of language in which a deficiency occurs.
- Neuropsychologist: Responsible for evaluating the executive functions of the brain in the case of a learning disability caused by a brain injury. In addition, a neuropsychologist may commission a so-called differential diagnosis to rule out other neural changes.
- Psychologist: Responsible for the care of the emotional side, as many learning difficulties tend to occur after a crisis in the family.
- Teacher: Teachers play a key role as they are usually able to identify the problem in the school atmosphere.
- Other experts: Neurologists, doctors and psychiatrists are also involved in the assessment of specific linguistic difficulty in the case of organic damage or cause.
Care
The treatment of special language difficulties requires the input of several different experts. After identifying a specific language difficulty, the experts work together to develop a strategy to correct and guide the child’s learning.
A speech therapist is a speech and language professional who can build a series of exercises to help a child learn to improve their language skills.
For example, in cases where a child mispronounces words or confuses the letters L and R due to a phonetic problem, the speech therapist develops a series of motoristic and linguistic pronunciation exercises to help correct the position of the mouth and tongue to produce the correct pronunciation.
The intervention of professionals depends on the type of language problem encountered. At this stage, the involvement of teachers in hearing and language is very important, as their role is to pay special attention to the problems the child has in understanding and expressing the language.
In conclusion, it should be recalled that children have higher levels of brain plasticity, as many of their brain functions are still in development. For this reason, it is essential that language and speech problems be addressed as soon as possible.
A child with early-onset dyslexia can develop strategies and skills to achieve proper learning. On the contrary, this can again prove to be a very difficult process for a person trying to overcome a problem 20 or 30 years after the start of erroneous learning.
