A longitudinal study of ten children with severe developmental language disorders

Abstract

On the basis of a neurolinguistic assessment procedure (Holmberg and Sahlen, 1986) ten children with severe and specific developmental language disorders (DLD) were studied over a four-year period. Initially they all showed global language problems which, in the course of development, became more specific. Although there were considerable differences in the neurolinguistic profiles, some general patterns were hypothesized. The linguistic analysis revealed some speech production correlates to these patterns. The results of the segmental phonological analysis and the grammatical analysis, however, did not reflect the differences between the neurolinguistic patterns. We argue that other, more dynamic aspects of language production, i.e. sentence prosody and speech rate, may better discriminate between children with different neurolinguistic patterns. A process-oriented approach to grammatical error analysis and the concept of linguistic levels are discussed.