Specific Language Impairment Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Specific Language Impairment - Term Paper Example In some cases, they are due to a physical problem such as hearing loss; in others the delay is short and children catch up quickly with their peers. But about 4 per cent of children have a specific impairment that has no physical cause but requires clinical attention (Watkins, 1994). These language impairments take several different forms. Some children have problems with making the correct sounds, others with classifying speech sounds (not recognizing that ‘pat’ and ‘potato’ begin with the same sound, for example) or get sounds in the wrong sequence. Grammar can also pose problems: some children aged six or seven talk in a babyish way, using short, ungrammatical sentences such as â€Å"yesterday I go to school† (Watkins, 1994). Professor Dorothy Bishop, a Welcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology, has been investigating this complex group of deficits and their many associated risk factors and syndromes (Leonard, 2004). Using a wide range of techniques – including experimental psychology, electrophysiology, genetics and language assessment – she is working to characterize the disorders and understand their origins. Professor Bishop has found that most children with specific language impairment have several underlying problems. The picture emerging is that there are multiple risk factors for specific language impairment that do not cause problems if they occur alone, but in combination with other deficits they do (Watkins, 1994). For example, electrophysiological studies have found that some children show unusually rapid decay of memory for incoming sounds. This is also found in the parents, even if they have no language difficulties themselves. Impairment results when this poor short-term memory is combined with other traits such as poor discrimination of word sounds (Watkins, 1994). In studies on twins and the parents of