Language Disorders

Language acquisition is a cornerstone to adequate child development and occurs in stages. Childhood language disorders occur as a result of a deviation in the normal course of language development and may affect the language comprehension and/or expression of children. They are manifested as difficulties in producing and/or understanding complex sentences, conveying thoughts and feelings to people. Childhood language disorders affect the way children use and process language.

Childhood language disorder is a risk factor for children's later development, being associated with enhanced behavioral, emotional and social difficulties. The behavioral and emotional disorders often have implications on social interactions and communication, literacy difficulties — including both reading and writing — and reduced levels of academic achievement. Childhood Language Disorder is one of the most common types of special education needs.

For example, rates of childhood language disorders among children in kindergarten (5–6 years) were reported as 12.6% by Beitchman et al. (1986) and 7.4% by Tomblin et al. (1997) in large-scale epidemiological studies in Canada and the US, respectively. The study in New Zealand found a prevalence of 7.6% among 3-year-old children (Silva, 1980).

There is a strong gender effect, with prevalence higher for boys than girls in all of these studies — for example, 8% boys, 6% girls in the Tomblin et al. (1997) sample — and this gender discrepancy has been consistently found in other research (Conti-Ramsden and Botting, 1999; Dockrell and Lindsay, 2000) and in the national statistics collected through the School Census of all children in state-funded schools in England. Childhood language disorder is also more prevalent among children from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds (Department for Education, 2015).

There is need for early intervention in the management of childhood language disorders. Parents of children with language disorders would require the service of a health care professional that would carry out a holistic assessment to rule out certain health conditions such as hearing loss. Also, professionals such as psychologists and speech-language pathologists would assess such child using various assessment scales.

Parents should pay attention to the overall development of their children so they can identify possible red flags of childhood language impairment and provide such children with the needed intervention from professionals.