Childhood dysphasia

Childhood dysphasia . Disorder in language acquisition that manifests itself in an alteration in the expression and understanding of language . Dysphasic children have language deficits, both comprehensive and expressive. They usually use gestures and mime to express themselves. It is one of the most difficult language disorders to diagnose and therefore to understand. The children who have this disorder suffer sometimes misunderstood by other parents, peers and teachers who tend to label what they are not. Therefore, it is convenient to have the help of experts who inform and advise on this disorder.

Table of Contents

Summary

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1 What is Dysphasia?
- 1 Most frequent symptoms
- 2 Exposed elements
- 3 Symptom classification given by the authors Rapen and Allen, 1983
- 4 Why does this disorder occur?
- 5 Consequences
- 6 Most effective treatments
2 Sources

What is dysphasia?

It is the language disorder due to failures in its organization, affects the expression and understanding of it, for possibly endogenous causes, present in the organism of these children from the beginning of their development. The communicative function of language is severely affected . Neuropathological studies indicate that according to these data, there is a predominance in the male of this disorder, because in the boy the left hemisphere develops more slowly and would be more exposed to possible alterations and hereditary predisposition.

The warning signs that children with some type of dysphasia can show are:

The appearance of his first words after 3 years.
The appearance of the first combinations after 4 years.
The persistence of a schematic language after 6 years.

Most frequent symptoms

In the literature there is a certain tradition of relating all the possible alterations in the learning of phonology , semantics , syntax and the pragmatic. It is important to keep in mind that not all cases show complete symptoms in all cases, they are also not present with the same frequency or intensity. There are a series of symptoms, which are the ones that appear most frequently and which are those related to the expression and understanding of language:

Omission of grammatical elements when organizing a sentence.
Sometimes they often show little intention of communicating with others.
Vocabulary poverty.
Difficulty using personal pronouns.
They do not usually use prepositions and conjunctions.
Verbs are often used in the infinitive.
Difficulty in acquiring morphemes such as gender, number, and verbal morphemes.
Impaired understanding, sometimes appearing deaf.
Difficulty remembering and repeating long sentences.
They react very well to non-verbal supports and therefore the use of gestures helps them a lot.
Repeating words without knowing their meaning.

Children can suffer psychological disorders, character alterations, self-esteem deficits, among others.

Often these symptoms are accompanied by other symptoms such as :

Spatial and temporal structuring alterations.
Difficulties in orofacial praxis: movements involved in the articulation of the phonemes.
Rhythm disturbances
Psychomotor difficulties: delay in motor skills, poorly defined laterality or late acquisition of laterality.
Attention deficit and hyperactivity.
Auditory discrimination problems: they tend to confuse some sounds with others or not to identify certain sounds that we know are familiar to the child.
Alterations in auditory memory: the child’s ability to retain and reproduce a series of verbally emitted numbers or words.

Exposed items

If we analyze the elements previously exposed we will realize that Dysphasia is a severe language disorder, the symptoms of this disorder encompass the morphosyntactic, lexicosemantic, phonological and pragmatic aspects, although the etiological factors are not clearly defined, an endogenous origin is appreciated that disorganizes the neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic mechanisms of communication. It is evident that the highest level of affectation is in the expressive part of the language, although the impressional part can also be affected.

When referring to the etiopathogenic origin of this disorder, Seeman states that the early appearance of Dysphasia allows us to reach the analysis that is given by the constitutional factor, as something very important, although perhaps not as a cause, but as a factor. predisposing. Other authors consider that Dysphasia is the product of both inherited and environmental factors. Also in relation to the perceptual-auditory component. It is possible to find in the development of dysphasias children with verbal deafness (hearing sounds without discrimination of verbal stimuli due to problems of perception at the central level).

The aforementioned criteria are supported by neurological studies carried out based on the hypothesis that during embryonic life the migration of certain neurons to the left hemisphere could be altered in certain cases, which would cause a reorganization of hemispheric dominance with an envelope. development of the right hemisphere. That is why the evolution of diphasic children is slow, with no rapid recovery phase.

Symptom classification given by the authors Rapen and Allen, 1983

Auditory verbal agnosia: the subject does not understand language, communicates with gestures, its expression. It is null or almost null, even in repetition. That is, there are deficiencies in the perceptual field, difficulties in phonemic discrimination at the semantic level.
Verbal dyspraxia: there is a totally or partially normal understanding, but with difficulties in the articulatory organization of the phonemes and words.
Phonological programming deficit: relatively normal understanding, but with some production fluency, although with little clarity. In repetition tasks improvement in the articulatory quality is achieved, in relation to the isolated repetition of syllables and short words, not so in sentences and long words.
Phonological-syntactic deficit.

Why does this disorder occur?

In many cases it is difficult to detect what the causes could be. However, in others it is known that it may be related to:

Brain injury or lack of oxygen at birth.
Traumatic brain injury at the time of delivery.
Infectious diseases like meningitis, encephalitis, etc. affecting the central nervous system.

Children with difficulties to communicate, affects the academic level causing, in many cases, failure in school learning and therefore social isolation

It should be clarified that it is not easy to know if the dysphasia is due to some type of brain injury, there are no conclusive data in this regard. For this reason we cannot say that these are causes of the problem, but we can say that they influence the delay in ripening. There are other factors that can aggravate or trigger this problem, such as a bad family environment or long periods of hospitalization.

Consequences

Due to the difficulty, both in expressing and understanding, social isolation occurs, leading to difficulties in integrating socially, since when they do not speak or do not understand, they tend to isolate themselves. This can also lead to erroneous diagnoses such as delayed language development, deafness, autism , etc. All these difficulties reverberate at the academic level, producing, in many cases, failure in school learning, especially in the learning of literacy and basic learning. As a consequence of all this, they can suffer psychological disorders such as changes in affective relationships, emotional problems, anxiety traits, self-esteem deficits and sometimes they show character changes.

More effective treatments

Dysphasia can be gradually overcome if the appropriate strategies and intervention methods are used. It is important to know that each child is different and that the learning rhythmeach one is different. For this reason it is important to take into account the evolutionary stage in which the child is and not to set goals for which they are not prepared. When setting goals and intervention strategies, it is very important to take into account the child’s neurological and psychological maturity. In any case, it is advisable to have school and family collaboration. It is essential that parents are well informed of what happens to their child and involve them in the treatment. As for the intervention strategies, it is worth clarifying that they are different and everything depends on each case, but the most general ones we can say are the following:

Hearing Discrimination Exercises: You are taught to distinguish different sounds that are familiar to the child. This is usually done through recordings and the child is asked to try to guess what sound it is. For example: sounds of stimuli that are in the child’s environment (wind, storm, birds, bells, etc.), sounds of musical instruments, sounds of animals, etc.
Working on auditory memory: It is common for the child to learn words and forget or distort them later. For this reason, it is important that the training is aimed at the analysis and synthesis of the word. It is very useful to mark the rhythm with blows or claps at the same time that the word is being spoken.
Exercises to increase vocabulary: usually start with concepts and words that are known to the child and progressively increase the level of difficulty. When the child already has a sufficient number of words, we move on to classify them and include them in categories. In this way we give functionality to the vocabulary that is being learned.
Oral-facial exercises and praxis: The objective is to achieve a correct pronunciation of the phonemes. These exercises consist of exercising and working all the organs that intervene in the articulation of the phonemes (the mouth, tongue, lips, breathing, etc.). They are asked to do open-close exercises, puff exercises, tongue movements, etc.
Activities to organize the semantic field: Through images or drawings, you play to relate some concepts to others, for example, a flower can be related to a garden.
Other activities: Exercises to increase verbal comprehension, morphosyntactic exercises, activities to learn the organization and structuring of sentences, etc.

There are many strategies that are used, everything will depend on the child and the level of maturity. But it should be clarified that they must be applied by professionals and specialists in the subject and, above all, have the collaboration of the family and the school in the entire intervention process.