LANGUAGE DISORDERS:

APHASIAS AND DYSLEXIAS

OTHER LANGUAGE-RELATED DISORDERS

SIGN LANGUAGE
Lectured by
Hasbi SJAMSIR

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Nita Maya Valiantien - Rini Sutarni - Sri Hartono - Yoga Andrean A.
 LANGUAGE DISORDERS
 In psycholinguistics, language disorder : a
divergence from the normal processes of
speech and comprehension which is due to
cognitive or affective factors.

 The term also covers problems of speech

production and reception which are
physiological in origin.
 Category of Language Disorders

 ACQUIRED VS DEVELOPMENTAL
 ORGANIC VS FUNCTIONAL
 RECEPTION VS PRODUCTION
 PERFORMANCE VS SYSTEM
 ACQUIRED VS DEVELOPMENTAL

Acquired disorder is an impairment which

occurs after a first language has been fully
established. It may derive from brain damage
(particularly to the left hemisphere) caused by
illness, accident or surgery.
Developmental disorder is an impairment which
manifests itself during the acquisition of a first
language. Examples:
- Dyslexia and dysgraphia (problem in processing the
language)
- Stammering (affective causes)
- Autism, Down’s Syndrome or Williams Syndrome
(learning difficulties)
- Specific language impairment (SLI) (Delayed
language acquisition).
 The distinction between acquired and
developmental disorders:
sometimes marked by the use of different
terms: the prefix dys- (¼ impaired) indicates a
developmental condition and the prefix a- (¼
without) an acquired one. Thus, aphasia ¼
acquired dysphasia; alexia ¼ acquired
dyslexia; agraphia ¼ acquired dysgraphia.
 ORGANIC VS FUNCTIONAL
In Organic Disorder, there is a clear
neurological or physiological cause

While in Functional Disorder, there are

problems of psychological processing.
 RECEPTION VS PRODUCTION
Language disorders affect reception,
production or both. With aphasia in particular,
the condition may be mainly restricted to
receptive aphasia or to expressive aphasia.
 PERFORMANCE VS SYSTEM
Performance Disorders : affect performance at
phonetic and graphetic level

System Disorders : affect the underlying

system (phonological,graphological, semantic
or syntactic).
The major issues on Language Disorders

 Problems of fluency
 Problems of written language
 The relationship between language and
cognition
 APHASIA
 Aphasia is an impairment of language. An acquired
communication disorder that impairs a person’s
ability to process language, but does not affect
intelligence.

 Impairs ability to speak and understand others and

most people with aphasia experience difficulty
reading and writing.
Types of Aphasia
 Global Aphasia – Most severe form
• Produce few recognizable words
• Understands little or no spoken speech
• Can neither read or write
 Usually seen after patient has suffered a stroke and may
rapidly improve if the damage has not been too extensive.
Greater brain damage, more severe and lasting disability.
 Broca’s Aphasia – speech output severely
reduced limited mainly to short utterances of
less than four words
• Vocabulary access limited
• Formation of sounds often laborious/clumsy
• May understand speech and be able to read but limited
in writing
• Halting and effortful quality of speech
 Mixed non-fluent aphasia-Sparse and effortful
speech resembling Broca’s
• Limited in comprehension of speech
• Patients do not read or write beyond an elementary
level
 Anomic Aphasia – Persons who are left with a
persistent inability to supply words for the
things that they want to talk about.
• Significant in nouns and verbs
• Understand speech well most cases read adequately
• Poor writing ability
The causes of Aphasia
 Most common cause of aphasia is stroke –
about 23 – 40% of stroke survivors acquire
aphasia.

 It is estimated that about one million people in

the United States have acquired aphasia, or 1
in 250 people.
 More common than Parkinson’s Disease,
cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy.

 About 1/3rd of severely head-injured persons

have aphasia.
Recovery from Aphasia
 After stroke – If symptoms last longer than two
or three months, complete recovery is unlikely
• People continue to improve over a period of time
• Slow process for both patient and FAMILY
• Need to learn compensatory strategies for
communicating
 Communication with Person with Aphasia
 Talk to the person as an adult NOT as a child
 Minimize or eliminate background noise
 Make sure you have the person’s attention
before communicating
 Encourage and use all modes of
communication
• Speech/writing/drawing/yes-no responses
 Give them time to talk and permit a reasonable
amount of time to respond
 Accept all communication attempts
 Keep your own communication simple but
adult
 Simplify sentence structure and reduce your
rate of speech
 Keep your voice at a normal level and
emphasize key words
 Augment speech with gesture and visual aids
when possible
 Repeat statements when necessary
 Do not attempt to finish the patients statement
for them
 DYSLEXIA
 Dyslexia is difficulty with language.
 People with dyslexia typically have average to above
average intelligence.
 They may have difficulty with reading, spelling,
understanding language they hear, or expressing
themselves clearly in speaking or in writing. An
unexpected gap exists between their potential for
learning and their school achievement.
Characteristics of Dyslexia
• Slow Word Recall
• Average or Above Intelligence
• Beyond third grade continuing to reverse and invert letters
and transpose words
• More difficulty decoding nonsense words than content
words
• Difficulty decoding single words in isolation
• Difficulty with letter/sound relationships
• Confusing small words such as at for to, said for and, does
for goes.
• Transposes number sequences and arithmetic signs (+, -, x,
=) although math skills are typically a strength
 May have difficulty learning to tell time
 Spelling is usually difficult, frequently spells the same word
differently in a single piece of writing
 Frequently able to decode a word they cannot spell
 Listening comprehension is usually a strength and the
student typically can comprehend at grade level what he
hears orally
 Poor grasp of abstract concepts
 Difficulty in telling or retelling a story
 Difficulty with rhyming words
 OTHER
OTHER LANGUAGE-RELATED
LANGUAGE-RELATED DISORDER
DISORDER

AUTISM

A condition characterized by a withdrawal from linguistic

interaction with others. The sufferer is often mute or uses
language in a non communicative way.

The symptoms of autism appear between the ages of one

and three, and are sometimes misdiagnosed as deafness.
 They include delayed cognitive and linguistic
development and a reduced ability to react to people,
events and objects.

 Autistic children tend to have exceptionally low IQs but

they may excel in one or two isolated skills such as
painting or music.

 The syndrome is much more common in males than in

females and appears to be caused by a physical
dysfunction of the brain.
DOWN SYNDROME

 Studies of Down’s Syndrome suggest a

connection between cognitive impairment and
failure to acquire full linguistic competence.

 Down’s sufferers show limitations of attention,

short-term memory and perceptual
discrimination; they also have difficulty with
symbolic representation of any kind.
 All of this appears to affect language
performance, though there is great variation
between individuals.

 Phonological development is slow. Only a

limited vocabulary is acquired, and utterances
usually remain short and ‘telegraphic’ (lacking
function words and inflections).
WILLIAM SYNDROM

 A genetic condition in which sufferers show

signs of cognitive impairment, yet their
language competence appears to be relatively
unaffected.
SIGN LANGUAGE
 Sign language : A language employed by those
with impaired hearing, whose modality is the
use of gesture rather than sound.

 Sign language is based on three components:

- the place where the sign is made,
- the shape and angle of the hand(s)
- the movement of the hand(s)
 Historically, many sign languages evolved naturally
within the communities that use them. This has given
rise to a distinctive American Sign Language (ASL),
British Sign Language (BSL), Australian Sign
language and so on.

 Sign is an independent linguistic system. It is not

simply a translation of speech into gesture in the way
that writing is a translation of speech into script.
 Psycholinguistics interest in studying sign language
because:

1. Sign originally developed naturally and independently

2. Sign uses a different modality from that of
conventional languages
3. Sign has a different linguistic structure from English.