Diagnóstico diferencial precoz entre el trastorno del lenguaje y el retraso del lenguaje a partir de los procesos de simplificación fonológica

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to identify the characterising phonological errors that allow an early differential diagnosis between SLI and LD. The subjects were 20 children composed by four groups: 5 children with SLI, 5 with LD, 5 age controls and 5 MLU-W controls. The phonological simplification processes (Ingram, 1983; Bosch, 1983; 1987) were identified in these groups and used as key variables to performed a stepwise discriminant analyses. The results showed that the variable that had the greatest power to discriminate the group TL from the groups LD, MLU controls and Age controls was the syllable omission and the variable that distinguished better between the SLI, LD and MLU controls from the age controls group was the omission of codas. However, this discriminant analysis couldn't reclassify the subjects in four groups (70 %) because all the variables had a lower power to discriminate between LD and MLU-W controls. In order to assess the hypothesis that the LD and MLU controls have the same phonological profile, another discriminant analysis were carried out with three groups (SLI [5 children], LD + MLU controls [10 children] and Age controls [5 children]).The results of this analysis showed that the same variables (omission of syllables and codas) could reclassify 90% of the subjects. This result indicates that the children with LD and MLU controls are acquiring the phonology similarly, whereas SLI children may be not. These results are further discussed in relation to the Surface Hypothesis of Leonard (1998)