Specific Language Impairment
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a condition observed in children who experience significant delays in acquiring the language skills necessary for effective communication, despite being exposed to language in their environment. SLI can affect both monolingual and bilingual children and tends to persist into adulthood. Unlike general language delays that children may outgrow, SLI is characterized by persistent deficits in both language comprehension and production, making it distinct from other developmental disorders like hearing impairments or autism.
Research has shown that SLI is more common in boys than in girls and is often identified when parents notice persistent difficulties in their child's speech and language use, even after repeated attempts at correction. Children with SLI may struggle with vocabulary development and the complexities of language, including grammar and sentence structure. While both genetic factors and environmental influences can play a role in SLI, genetics appear to have a significant impact, with the condition often running in families.
As a result, children with SLI may face challenges in academic settings, especially when learning additional languages, which can further complicate their educational experiences. Understanding and supporting children with SLI requires awareness of their unique language needs and linguistic challenges.
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Subject Terms
Specific Language Impairment
Specific language impairment describes children who are learning to use the language of their environment to communicate but have delays in mastering language skills. Specific language impairment is observed in children of both monolingual and bilingual backgrounds, and it continues to persist through adulthood. Since the 1970s studies in specific language impairment have attracted scholars in various fields such as psychology, language acquisition, education, and medicine.
Overview
Language impairment refers to children who suffer delays during their language development stage, particularly when they are learning to speak the language of their environment. The term specific is used to differentiate between the language impairment from other impairments, such as hearing or autism. Specific language impairment refers to deficiencies in either language comprehension or production or both. Children with this condition are delayed in their ability to use language to express themselves. Compared to their peers in the same age group who are developing their linguistic knowledge according to expected milestones, most children with specific language impairment exhibit a delayed onset of speech and a limited vocabulary. Although the language problem is observed as soon as children are developing their linguistic knowledge, they exhibit difficulty in using vocabulary during their school years due to their limited ability in expressive and receptive behavior in the language. Specific language impairment occurs more frequently in boys than in girls. Notably, specific language impairment is different from a delay in the ability to talk in children, because the former persists throughout the lifecycle and in the latter children often catch up with their peers.
Although the problem of specific language impairment was discovered decades ago, it was only in 2000 when the American Psychiatric Association categorized it as specific language impairment that entails either or both deficits in receptive and expressive language. Researchers have determined that the condition has a genetic component. Children with specific language impairment are most likely to have inherited it from their family members. While the environment can also affect language development in children, it is not considered the main reason for the impairment. Specific language impairment is usually suspected when parents have tried to model speech patterns that their child fails to adopt even after repeated corrections; the child will also habitually overuse inaccurate speech and language patterns. In many cases children with such language disorders will find the morphological and syntactic aspects of a language challenging. They have difficulty with parts of speech such as personal pronouns, verbs forms, possessives, and propositions. Children with bilingual backgrounds demonstrate similar challenges in both their languages. Learning additional languages poses many challenges for children with specific language impairment, and their academic performance usually suffers.
Bibliography
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