• Users Online: 2019
  • Home
  • Print this page
  • Email this page
Home About us Editorial board Search Ahead of print Current issue Archives Submit article Instructions Subscribe Contacts Login 
ARTICLES
Year : 2012  |  Volume : 28  |  Issue : 1  |  Page : 56-63

Prosodic assessment in Egyptian children with specific language impairment


1 Phoniatric Unit, ENT Department, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
2 Phoniatric Unit, ENT Department, Faculty of Medicine, Bani Suef University, Egypt

Correspondence Address:
Elham A. Shaheen
30 Milsa Towers, City stars. Madinet Nasr, Cairo
Egypt
Login to access the Email id

Source of Support: None, Conflict of Interest: None


DOI: 10.7123/01.EJO.0000411076.60229.ab

Rights and Permissions

Background Prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. Prosody includes aspects such as intonation and tone of voice. Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder in which language development is below the chronological age despite normal nonverbal intelligence and no obvious neurological or physiological impairments or emotional and/or social difficulties that could impact language use. Most of these children experience considerable difficulty in language comprehension and/or production and experience specific problems in learning syntactic rules. In the speech stream, boundaries of major syntactic constituents are reliably marked by prosodic cues. Although deficits in related aspects of prosody have been hypothesized to underlie SLI, prosody has been little studied in Egyptian children having SLIs. Objective The objective of this work was to assess prosody in Egyptian children with an SLI in order to correlate the results with the clinical profile of the patients so as to choose the proper rehabilitation training program. Participants and method This study included 30 Egyptian children with SLIs and 30 normal children as a control group; their ages ranged between 4 and 6 years. Assessment included language assessment using the Arabic language test and prosodic assessment using the protocol of prosodic assessment, which was especially designed to assess prosodic abilities in Arabic-speaking children. Results Results revealed a significant difference in most of the individual and total subjective scores of prosodic skills between the control group and children with SLIs. Although the difference in the average of the total objective scores of prosodic assessment, which included pitch and energy, was highly significant, the average of total sentence duration was insignificant. There was significant correlation between the total language age and all subjective scores and an insignificant correlation with the total objective scores of prosodic assessment skills in SLI children. Conclusion SLI children have defective receptive, expressive, subjective, and objective scores of prosodic assessment skills that should be considered during the rehabilitation program for language stimulation for these children.


[FULL TEXT] [PDF]*
Print this article     Email this article
 Next article
 Previous article
 Table of Contents

 Similar in PUBMED
   Search Pubmed for
   Search in Google Scholar for
 Related articles
 Citation Manager
 Access Statistics
 Reader Comments
 Email Alert *
 Add to My List *
 * Requires registration (Free)
 

 Article Access Statistics
    Viewed2784    
    Printed49    
    Emailed0    
    PDF Downloaded151    
    Comments [Add]    

Recommend this journal