Language Disorders

Language Disorders

• Medical and Psychosocial Aspects of Disability
• 11/2/04

Communication

• There are 3 elements in this exchange, and all must be present:
• Message
• Message must be expressed
• Message must be understood

Speech and Language

• Speech is the motor act of communicating by articulating verbal expression
• Language is the knowledge of a symbol system used for interpersonal communication.

Four domains of language

• Phonology
• Grammar
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

Phonology

• The ability to produce and discriminate the specific sounds of a given language.
• Its unit, the phoneme, is characterized by distinctive features.
• Babies start discriminating phonemes during the first few months of life, and they produce them soon after.

Phonology

• Phonological receptivity is pluripotential at birth
• Starts to decay at around 10 months
• Reaches a rather general inability to acquire native phonology by preadolescence

Grammar

• The underlying rules that organize any specific language.
• The combinatorial rules that most native speakers of a language recognize as acceptable for that language and that allow a native speaker an infinite array of generative possibilities.

Grammar

• Composed of both morphology and syntax.

Morphology

• The within-word structure, syntax on the between-word structure.
• Morphology studies the smallest word unit that impacts on meaning, the morpheme.

Syntax

• The set of rules that governs:
• the types of words
• their order
• the rigidity of this order
• the way to formulate a question or a negation