CLINICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDREN REFERRED TO A CHILD-DEVELOPMENT CENTER FOR EVALUATION OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND COMMUNICATION DISORDERS

Speech, language, and communication disorders are prominent reasons fo r referrals to a child development center, From 1984 to 1988, 1,090 pr eschool children were referred to our child development center, which serves the Tel Aviv metropolitan area, Of all referrals, 432 (41%) wer e primarily due to speech, language, and communication problems, After exclusion of those with IQ <50 and those with non-language-related di sabilities, 323 children remained, The children were classified into d ifferent subtypes of developmental language disorders and autistic spe ctrum disorders, The main developmental language disorder subtypes wer e combined expressive-receptive (49%) and expressive (44%), Central pr ocessing deficits were less common, occurring in 20 (7%) of the childr en, Parents of children with developmental language disorders had educ ational levels similar to those of parents of children referred to the child development center for other causes, However, parents of childr en with infantile autism had higher educational levels than parents of children with developmental language disorder or parents of children referred for other causes (P < .001), Our results reflect the distribu tion of language and related problems in an unselected population of p reschool children referred to a child development center. (C) 1996 by Elsevier Science Inc.