Asynchronous language acquisition in developmental dysphasia

A longitudinal study was conducted to document and compare evolution of chi ldren with linguistic acquisition impairment, To determine whether developm ent of the analytic mechanisms underlying linguistic processing occured in similar fashion, two children with mixed developmental dysphasia were asses sed from 4 to 5:6 years of age with psycholinguistic tests Lit 6-month inte rval. Spontaneous speech and language production (consonant repertory in in itial word position, MLU, and lexical diversity) were investigated in a sta ndardized symbolic play context. The phonologic and lexico-morphologic evol ution analyses revealed a marked improvement in motel control of phonology and in the application of morphosyntaxic rules in child 1. whereas child 2 was still impaired in phonology and morphosyntax. The singular developmenta l changes in spontaneous speech results indicate dynamic relationships betw een various language production facets and variability in the kind of defic it and lexical automation presented by these children. These contrasts in t he evolution of language production profiles between child 1 and child 2 al so underline the importance of longitudinal studies in the analysis of the atypical linguistic processing paths used by children with developmental dy sphasia. (C) 2000 Academic Press.