Specific
Language Disorder, also known as Specific Language Impairment or Language Delay,
is estimated to affect between six and eight percent of the British population.
When realising that autism is present in about one percent of the British population,
a better picture forms to show the growing number of children who cope with
and need to overcome the obstacles associated with this condition. Other disorders
which are less common have been the subjects of far more intense research in
the medical and scientific community.
Unlike some other language impairments, children with Specific Language Disorder
do not have any hearing impairment or learning disability. SLD children routinely
test average or above in nonverbal communications and there’s no indication
of SLD being associated with a low IQ. This article will look at what research
suggests when dealing with Specific Language Disorder and the problems associated
with such a condition for a child in a bilingual household.
What are the symptoms of Specific Language Disorder?
Children with Specific Language Disorder will often show delayed speech. If
your child is working with a speech pathologist, psychologist, or teacher trained
in dealing with language disorders, they may refer to this as a ‘Language
Delay’. Often children with this condition will hit verbal plateaus later
than your average child; they may not talk at all by two years of age or may
be well under the average two year old’s speech capabilities. When they
do start talking, they may be very difficult to understand.
Common symptoms of Specific Language Disorder include missing words in phrases
and questions. For example, instead of asking, “Where did he go?”
a child with SLD might say, “Did he go?” They often use the wrong
tense, as well. So, instead of saying, “We stayed at the party all day.”
They might say, “We stay at the party all day” When a word needs
an, ‘ed’ at the end to indicate a past tense or an ‘s’
to show plural, the child with SLD will commonly miss those endings.
A child with SLD may have trouble learning to read if the condition goes undetected.
This is why it’s so important to diagnose and treat SLD as soon as the
condition becomes apparent; in this way the child can be worked with closely,
using better methods for their language ability. Often signs of Specific Language
Disorder can be similar to other learning disabilities. When there is no sign
of hearing impairment and the other social, emotional, and motor skill advancements
are intact, SLD can be diagnosed.
What new information has research yielded?
Specific Language Disorder has been studied and researched widely over the last
forty five years. Unfortunately, hard facts are slightly lacking. There is,
so far, no medical sign post to positively identify the problem. Currently,
a child is termed SLD when there is apparent language delay with no other disability,
such as retardation or hearing loss, to account for the lower speech ability.
While it’s thought that Specific Language Disorder may be inherited,
the lack of any type of medical marker makes a true scientific diagnosis difficult
to apply. Some studies have found a significant link between relations with
the disorder, which makes for a credible hypothesis that this speech disability
is genetically inherited. In one study conducted in 2001, British scientists
were able to identify an identical chromosome which affected fifteen members
of a family with language disabilities. (The University of Kansas Merrill Advanced
Studies Center)
Even with these vast leaps in scientific discovery, Specific Language Disorder
remains somewhat elusive. There is still an active debate over what exactly
causes the delayed language in these children and which parts of the brain or
body are affected. Some researchers believe that the root of the problem lies
in the child’s ability to process the information they hear. Therefore,
this theory leads to the hypothesis that children with Specific Language Disorder,
in fact, suffer from a cognitive disorder which does not interrupt their ability
to hear language, but does affect their ability to interpret and process that
speech.
Other researchers have posed the hypothesis that these children do not have
an overall cognitive deficit but, instead, suffer from selective deficits in
using or representing the language itself. In other words, rather than having
problem with their brain processing and understanding language, these researches
believe the child might simply have a problem verbalising what they understand
correctly.
Applying the research
So, what does all of this mean for the child? So far, speech therapists, teachers,
paediatricians, and specialists have taken a common sense approach to dealing
with Specific Language Disorder in children. In lieu of factual, accurate diagnosis,
it becomes a ‘hands on’, best way to treat the individual child
situation. There is no pill or medication that can alleviate these symptoms
and no known way to determine whether or not the child will develop a life long
difficulty with language or whether they will, in fact, outgrow it. Many children
who suffer from SLD in early years do outgrow the symptoms and go on to lead
healthy mental and scholastic lives. Some have difficulty with reading or language
abilities in the long term.
What we know currently is that the child exhibiting SLD needs extra time and
attention in order to improve language skills. Without a diagnosis, many children
with SLD get the exact opposite; because they are easily misunderstood, they
become discouraged and stop asking questions and communicating often. Once a
parent or teacher is aware of the difficulty, they can use patience and care
to coax the child into more communication, which will help in their development
verbally. The current line of thought is that these children are slower in picking
up natural language than the average, unaffected child.
Applying this knowledge to bilingual children
Again, the approach to bilingual children with Specific Language Disorder is
similar to those who are monolingual; common sense rather than scientifically
based. Paediatricians and speech therapists discourage the learning of secondary
languages for a child with SLD. When the child is born into a family from a
different country of origin, where the native language spoken in the home is
different than the language of the community where the child will grow in, it’s
suggested that the household decide on one language and use that language only,
without any use of the other language. Often it’s decided that the entire
family should stop using the primary language in deference of the language in
their chosen country. This makes for an easier time in assimilating the child
to their future community, rather than teaching them in one language, necessitating
the need for learning a secondary language later in school.
The questions are: is learning two languages at once really detrimental to
the Specific Language Disorder child and will they have a harder time understanding
one or both languages? It may depend on which theory as to the cause of the
disorder is correct. If SLD is caused by a cognitive problem, then learning
two separate languages at the same time would be both harder for the child and
could most certainly lead to confusion and frustration for both the child and
his or her family. If Specific Language Disorder is, instead, merely a problem
of representing or verbalising the language they learn, then there’s little
reason to believe a child with SLD would have any more confusion in a bilingual
home than any average child without the disorder.
More study and research needs to be conducted in order to reach a definitive
answer. Currently the consensus is that bilingual homes offer a disadvantage
to the child with SLD and the family should, instead, conform to a monolingual
household for the child’s better learning. However, it was once thought
that bilingual children in general were at a disadvantage in regular learning.
Common consensus currently states that the bilingual child without any language
disorder is not at any disadvantage in their scholastic or cognitive growth
and may, in fact, be better served by the additional exposure to a second language.
It’s thought in many circles to be advantageous to learn more than one
language from an early age, and is not commonly thought to be negative at all.
Keeping this in mind, it’s entirely possibly that the current theory that
children with Specific Language Disorder should not be exposed to more than
one language in their formative years will eventually be reconsidered.
Other variables at play include studies of Specific Language Disorder children
in America, Canada, England, and Italy. Some studies suggest that children with
SLD whose language is Italian or French have an easier time communicating and
progress with less difficulty than those speaking English. English itself is
considered a more difficult language to learn than some of the romance languages,
as the rules often change and there are no feminine and masculine pronouns and
nouns. So what does this type of information offer in the way of determining
a set path for bilingual children with SLD? Possibly that if their primary language
is a romance language it may be easier for them to grasp than a secondary language
of English though, again, this is not definitive.
A better course of action, if deciding to limit the Specific Language Disorder
child’s exposure to one specific language, is to start with the language
of your own community. If you are raising your child in England or the United
States, it’s best to teach them English even though the language may pose
particular problems. Otherwise the child will be limited to home rather than
the social exposure of school, or they will have to start all over at school
age to learn a completely new secondary language, when their primary language
is already likely delayed. This type of scenario might pose overwhelming strain
for any child, let alone a child with SLD.
Children from bilingual homes can have a range of language abilities without
SLD entering into the picture. Often it’s found that the oldest child
born to a family with a different language of origin, for this example we’ll
use Bengali, will speak fluently in Bengali and at least adequately in English.
Often, due to a lack of formal training, these oldest children do not learn
to read or write in their primary language, though they do become literate in
the community language. To gauge whether or not they excel in their formal language
becomes a difficult thing to determine as it is dependent on the child more
than as indicative of their bilingual background.
What we see anecdotally in second children and following siblings is slightly
different. Often by the time the second and subsequent children reach an age
of active memory and speech development, the oldest sibling and, frequently,
the parents are already speaking fluently in the adopted language of their new
home. The degrees can vary from home to home, depending on the parents’
ability and comfort with the new language, but with good regularity the later
children will learn the new language much earlier and to a larger extent than
their parents’ native language. It’s not uncommon for second or
third siblings to understand their parents’ language but not speak it
well or often. This is thought largely to be more of a confidence issue, as
these children will frequently have an accent in their parents’ language,
or be unable to form the words exactly as a native would.
With such large variables as these in cases where no Specific Language Disorder
is associated, it becomes difficult to clearly judge what kind of an impact
SLD might have on a bilingual child. While the learning of two languages simultaneously
may well have a negative impact on the child, or might leave them at a disadvantage
to excel in either language, difficulty with the language of origin may well
be delineated in the same fashion that a child with no Specific Language Disorder
might exhibit. Currently, the best method for ensuring the child with SLD the
best possible success in language growth is in making certain they have optimal
exposure to hearing and using speech. Limiting one language may be advantageous
in this scenario and will often be advised.
© 2007 Shahidun Rahman
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shahidun Rahman
was born and raised in Cambridge, England with her twin sister.
Her parents are Bangladeshi immigrants. She is married with four children, three
boys and a girl and still lives in Cambridge. Her eldest son, Ibrahim who grew
up with Semantic Pragmatic Language Disorder (SPLD), an autistic disorder. Shahida
published her first book, called ‘Ibrahim- Where in the Spectrum Does
He Belong?’ (Published by her own company, Perfect Publishers Ltd)
which is included on the National Autistic Society’s list of publications.
The book tells the story of her son, highlights the lack of awareness of this
condition within our society, but particularly within the Bangladeshi community
where autism is not widely recognised. Her other two sons experienced delayed
speech and are also bilingual. She has written her second book, a historical novella and is working on a radio
play and articles.
