The psychopathological profile of children with language impairments, aged 4 to 12, not
diagnosed with SLI yet. Both control and experimental groups were chosen after a linguistic screening among children sent to clinical services for observation. Specific Language Impairments (SLI) are characterized by altered language acquisition. Afflicted children may
start talking later than their peers and show different production and comprehension deficits according to their specific linguistic disturbance (i.e. phonetic, phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic disturbance). The present study focused on children with language impairments, aged 4 to 12. Relying on the objectives of other studies conducted to
date, we aimed to investigate whether:
- there were more behavioural-emotional problems in children with language impairments than in their referred peers with unimpaired language development;
- language impairments were associated with more internalizing than externalizing problems and what kind of problems there were;
- the association between language and behavioural-emotional problems were influenced by the childrenâs cognitive levels, gender or age at evaluation time.
Screening instruments for behavioural-emotional problems should be used regularly during linguistic evaluation. Moreover, the influence of cognitive level on linguistic impairment effects should not be underestimated.
Increased Internalizing Problems in Children Aged 4 to 12 With Language Impairments
Brambilla P
Last date updated on June, 2014
