Dysgrammatism
Dysgrammatism ( old gr .: Dys = bad [here = miss-], gramma = letters [here = -handwriting]) is a language development disorder . It describes a sub-problem of a child's language acquisition disorder, in which children are not able to form sentences morphologically and syntactically according to their age-related language.
Liebmann first described the disorder in 1901 under the term agrammatism infantilis . It took until the 1980s for the disorder to be understood in terms of descriptive school grammar. There are many reasons for the late return to the topic of dysgrammatism. It was found that the treatment of dysgrammatic speaking children was unsuccessful. Only the use of developmental psycholinguistic results released the disorder from its connection with “normal” language development. This change in point of view had a significant impact on diagnosis and therapy .
Disturbance phenomena
The disorder manifests itself, among other things, in the child's speech production. The following overview gives an overview, without claiming to be exhaustive, of the observable symptoms:
- Subject-Verb Congruence: The child lacks the understanding that the subject controls the verb. Example: Instead of “You are sitting” , “You are sitting” is formed.
- Incorrect case marking: The case indicates what relationship a noun has in the sentence. Example: Instead of “I like going to school” becomes “I like going to school” .
- Incorrect gender markings: The gender markings indicate the gender of a noun. When acquiring a language, this must also be included in the linguistic lexicon. If children have only saved a few features of a word (lemma and word form), accurate application is not possible. Articles are either chosen alternately or constantly in the wrong shape.
- Incorrect plural marking: The problem here is similar to that of gender marking. Here, too, the child has to learn this feature for every word in the course of his language acquisition, as there is no regularity in German, as the following example should make clear: the banana (singular), the banana-n (plural) , but the key (singular ), the key (plural) .
- Wrong verb position in main clause: The verb always comes second in German. The only exceptions are imperative sentences ( “run to the car” ) or decision-making questions ( “would you prefer an apple or a banana” ). In children with a language disorder, there is often a verb ending ( “I want ball” ).
It should be noted that the occasional occurrence of deviations in grammatical structures from the children's reference language is normal in the course of their language acquisition and does not mean that the child suffers from dysgrammatism. Dysgrammatism is characterized above all by an inhomogeneous ability profile.
Condition background
It is assumed that children have so-called bootstrapping strategies in connection with language acquisition , which enable them to concentrate only on the necessary data when learning the grammatical system, which they then filter out and process. Various risk factors can be identified that can cause a disruption of the bootstrapping strategy:
- Linguistic input and interaction: Children depend on linguistic input in the course of acquiring grammar. If this is inadequate or if it itself consists of errors on a morphological and syntactic level, this can make the learning process more difficult, if not even bring it to a standstill.
- Memory capacity: The working memory consists among other things of the central executive as control authority and the phonological loop . The central executive encodes linguistic information and for a short time passes it to the phonological loop, which keeps the encoded information completely available. These are then compared with existing information and processed. If the child does not have sufficient phonological loop capacity, the information expires before it can be processed. This means that new linguistic input cannot be transferred to long-term memory.
- Perception of temporal sequences: In language, rhythm and temporal sequence play an important role. In children who speak dysgrammatically, it was found that the perception of chronological sequences is disturbed. Thus, these children find it difficult to identify the position of parts of a sentence.
Diagnosis
The psycholinguistic approach largely dispenses with a deficit or product-oriented description of a language disorder in the sense of the question "What is the child speaking wrongly?" That is why today we are looking for an answer to the question “How does the child arrange his speech production?” In diagnostics. A wide range of instruments is therefore used when diagnosing dysgramism. This includes language analyzes such as COPROF and ESGRAF, but also informal tests and subtests from recognized development tests, such as the intelligence test K-ABC .
COPROF
The computer-aided profile analysis (COPROF) was developed by Clahsen and Hansen, which primarily supports the work step of analyzing spontaneous speech. The diagnostician collects a voice sample using a profile sheet. He then enters the sentences or utterances to be analyzed on the PC (approx. 100–150) and answers questions about the length of the utterances, from which the computer then creates a profile analysis. The disadvantage is that familiarization with the program takes a long time. In addition, it is doubted that the analysis of spontaneous speech can reconstruct the grammatical system of rules of a child, since one only records the linguistic modality of coding and the excerpt from 100 utterances seems too small to get a comprehensive overview.
ESGRAF
- see main article ESGRAF
The evoked language diagnosis of grammatical skills (ESGRAF) tries to grasp the development of the child’s grammatical system of rules through playful diagnosis situations. It consists of planned role-play arrangements with figures, in which children carry out familiar forms of play with the diagnostician, such as hide-and-seek, guessing games, shopping, etc. Different linguistic modalities, such as coding, reconstruction and decoding, are evoked by the role play. Time-consuming transcription is not necessary. In addition, ESGRAF also offers interpretation aids to identify a funding focus.
Therapy options
Developmental Proximal Speech Therapy
The development-proximal speech therapy goes back to Dannenbauer. At its core, it is about conveying linguistic target structures that have been recognized by a previous diagnosis as relevant to therapy and development for the child. The focus is less on the deficits and more specifically on the existing language skills of the child in order to initiate the next development steps in grammar acquisition based on these.
A good relationship between child and therapist is seen as an important prerequisite. The main diagnostic method used is COPROF. The child's language level or ability profile is determined and continued throughout the therapy. It is assumed that the child will have the same grammar acquisition skills as a child without dysgrammatism, but that these have yet to be triggered. For this purpose, situations (especially play situations in the case of children) are created in which the therapist confronts the child with linguistic structures. The therapist's language serves as a model by which the child should recognize the grammatical structures.
Context optimization
The context optimization goes back to Motsch. He is based on the assumption that children with language disorders have different requirements for acquiring the language. This means that not all children benefit equally from a therapy setting. He therefore proposes a multidimensional approach that takes up various therapy concepts and makes use of their advantages. The aim is to create the best possible learning situation for the child by changing the components of a therapy. Context optimization is characterized by resource orientation, modalities and cause orientation.
See also
literature
- A. Liebmann: Agrammatism infantilis. Archive for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases 34, 1901, pp. 240-252
- F. Dannenbauer: Developmental dysgramism as a specific Form of expression of developmental dysphasia. Histor., Sprachheilkunde and speech psychologist. Perspectives . 1983
- H. Clahsen: Profile analysis: a linguistic procedure for language diagnosis in preschool age. Marhold, Berlin 1986
- H. Clahsen: Normal and disturbed children's language . 1988
- H. Schöler (et al.): Recent research results on the kindl. D. In: M. Grohnfeldt (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Sprachtherapie . Volume 4: Disturbances in grammar . 1991, pp. 54-82
- FM Dannenbauer: Grammar . In: S. Baumgartner, I. Füssenich (Ed.): Speech therapy with children . 1992, pp. 132-203
- D. Hansen: Language Acquisition and Dysgrammatism . Reinhardt, Munich 1996
- H.-J. Motsch: Context Optimization. Promotion of grammatical skills in therapy and teaching . Reinhardt, Munich 2004
In the movie
- La couleur des mots is a film by Philippe Blasband that seeks understanding. It shows 24 hours in the life of a young woman with dysgrammatism. Length 63 min, French (also available with English subtitles) Information on the director's website.
