A NONWORD REPETITION ABILITY AS A COMPLEMENT TO A FAMILY HISTORY OF A CHILD

Abstract

The pathomechanism of Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is generally viewed as the disruption of the processing of the acoustic signal and the short term phonological memmory weakening (Smolík, 2009). At the time it's shown, that in some families, the occurrence of Language Impairment is visibly higher (Leonard, 2000) than in other families. The Non-Word repeatition task is a sensitive and fast instrument for the children identifided at risk for LI, precisely due to the fact that it's based on the analysis and processing of quickly changing, and shortly lasting sound signals without any support of the word meaning (Kapalková, Polišenská, Vicenová, 2013). We asked ourselves, if the parents of the children with language difficulties also show a deficit in the area of short term phonological memory. We decided to confirm this hypothesis by a generally accepted diagnostic marker - the Non-Word repetition task, which both parents of the children with LI were tested with. Their scores were then compared with the ones of the parents of typically developing children The results show, that the parents of children with LI statistically have a much lower score in Non-word repetition task than the parents of the children from the control group. The gained data confirms the existence of a genetical predisposition for language difficulties in watched slovak speaking families.

Keywords

• nonword
• children at risk
• specific language impairmant
• language impairment
• family history
• parents
• genetical predisposition