Linguistic Development in «Global Developmental Delay»
Marialisa Ianieri, Mirco Fanelli, Fasolo
The aim of this research is to verify whether there is a relationship between the linguistic abilities of children with global developmental delay and their prosody. From the literature review, we note a link between the segmental components of language and the suprasegmental ones. Understanding whether there is a connection between these two elements could allow prosody to be used as an element of initial qualitative assessment, promoting the possibility of early intervention. Ten children diagnosed with «global developmental delay» participated (ICD-10: F88), all of whom had a more or less serious impairment in the linguistic area. Before starting the evaluation, the participants’ medical records were viewed and subsequently the administration of standardized tests began in the months of January and February 2023. The tests used for this purpose were: NCT (Narrative Competence Task), PFLI (Tests for the phonological evaluation of childhood language), BVL 4-12 (Language assessment battery) with the subtests of Naming and Articulation, Lexical Comprehension, Grammatical Comprehension and Sentence Repetition, and PVCL (Tests for the evaluation of Linguistic Comprehension). For the evaluation of prosody, we used the PRAAT software, which provided important values for this study, which are: speed, F_0, F_min, F_max and the number of movements on the syllables. Subsequently, participants underwent a six-month treatment with specific goals drawn up after the assessment, followed by a reassessment of narrative skills and prosody. What is observed is a strong variability between participants in the test results, important characteristics at the prosodic level and a clear difference between t0 and t1, particularly in prosody. In fact, at t1 a prosodic improvement was observed in all participants, since they produced utterances in a single profile and did not segment the sentence, as had happened at t0. For narrative skills, however, the results obtained at t0 were compared with those of t1 and no changes emerged, underlining that the duration of the treatment (six months) is too short to highlight changes in the highest ability of the participants’ linguistic development.
Keywords
Global developmental delay, Segmental components of language, Suprasegmental components of language, Prosodic analysis, Speech therapy treatment.
