Children with Communication Disorders

The ability to communicate with others is critical to a young child's development and it is a prerequisite to academic learning, yet some children have disorders that interfere with various aspects of their abilities to communicate. This digest discusses various types of communication disorders, their incidence, the learning difficulties associated with them, the special case of English language learners, and the educational significance of communication disorders.

What is a Communication Disorder?

Children with communication disorders have deficits in their ability to exchange information with others. A communication disorder may occur in the realm of language, speech and/or hearing. Language difficulties include spoken language, reading and/or writing difficulties. Speech encompasses such areas as articulation and phonology (the ability to speak clearly and be intelligible), fluency (stuttering), and voice. Hearing difficulties may also encompass speech problems (e.g., articulation or voice) and/or language problems. Hearing impairments include deafness and hearing loss, which can result from a conductive loss, a sensorineural loss, a mixed loss, or a central hearing loss.

Communication disorders may result from many different conditions. For example, language-based learning disabilities are the result of a difference in brain structure present at birth. This particular difficulty may be genetically based. Other communication disorders stem from oral-motor difficulties (e.g., an apraxia or dysarthia of speech), aphasias (difficulties resulting from a stroke which may involve motor, speech and/or language problems), traumatic brain injuries, and stuttering, which is now believed to be a neurological deficit. The most common conditions that affect children's communication include language-based learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, cerebral palsy, mental disabilities, cleft lip or palate, and autism spectrum disorders.

The Incidence of Communication Disorders

How many children have a communication disorder? Estimates vary according to the specific disability. According to the Twenty-Second Annual Report to Congress on the Implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (US Department of Education, 2001), more than 20 percent of students with disabilities or 1,074,548 children, aged 6 to 21, were served under IDEA in the 1996-97 school year. IDEA also served a smaller number of students with hearing impairments (70,883). Attention deficit disorder can affect as many as two million children, or three to five percent of American children (American Speech, Language and Hearing Association, 2001; Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, 2001).

Characteristics of Children with Communication Disorders

A child with a communication problem may present many different symptoms. These may include difficulty following directions, attending to a conversation, pronouncing words, perceiving what was said, expressing oneself, or being understood because of a stutter or a hoarse voice. Problems with language may involve difficulty expressing ideas coherently, learning new vocabulary, understanding questions, following directions, recalling information, understanding and remembering something that has just been said, reading at a satisfactory pace, comprehending spoken or read material, learning the alphabet, identifying sounds that correspond to letters, perceiving the correct order of letters in words, and possibly, spelling. Difficulties with speech may include being unintelligible due to a motor problem or due to poor learning. Sounding hoarse, breathy or harsh may be due to a voice problem. Stuttering also affects speech intelligibility because the child's flow of speech is interrupted.