Language Weaknesses Associated with Academic Delays

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Language Comprehension and Production

• Delayed rate of early language development; trouble naming objects or people
• Weak auditory memory (recalling digits, words, or sentences)
• Poor memory for idea units in a dictated story
• Difficulty with auditory closure (combining sound fragments into whole words)
• Poor verbal-coding ability (translating nonverbal events into words to aid recall)
• Poor auditory discrimination of sounds and words; confuses words with similar sounds (frustrate for fluctuate; produces hybrids such as flustrate )
• Difficulty identifying words masked by background noise (auditory figure-ground problem)
• Poor story retelling: includes fewer words and ideas, events, grammatically complex sentences, descriptions of internal (seeing, feeling) responses, gerunds and participles; less use of pronouns and conjunctions to make stories cohesive; less mature plot elements (major character, motivating conflict, appropriate sequence); uses pronouns for which referents haven't been specified
• Less mature verbal associations (such as responding red goes with bird vs. red goes with blue)
• Trouble understanding ambiguous sentences, proverbs, jokes
• Poor ability to differentiate statements of information from questions
• Poor comprehension of long, complex sentences, semantics, and sentence structures
• Small speaking vocabulary (uses vague and imprecise language); uses simple sentence types and immature linguistic patterns
• Speech is slow or halting; uses verbal "stalling" mechanisms (uh, urn, you know)
• Poor knowledge of grammatical rules
• Weak ability to define words, provide verbal opposites, formulate sentences and converse (conveying directions, elaborate), give logical reasons for common events, classify and compare
• Poor sequencing of verbal information, as in telling a story from beginning to end
• Poor understanding of the verbal categories of space and time
• Poor comprehension and learning of puns, synonyms, homonyms
• Cluttered and disorganized speech; poor sentence formation
• Inefficient use of prosodic cues (stress, pitch, pauses) to aid comprehension
• Minor articulation difficulties
• Weak comprehension of rapidly spoken language
• Doesn't modulate tone of voice appropriately; speaks in monotone, or too loud
• Lower Verbal IQ than Performance IQ

Reading Readiness

• Mispronounces words (such as aluminum, specific) and phonologically complex phrases (the brown and blue plaid pants)
• Can't rapidly name pictured objects, colors, shapes, letters, numerals, or events (as in birthday party)
• Wrong labels given for common objects, people, letters, numerals
• Insensitive to rhymes and alliterations
• Doesn't understand Pig Latin game
• Poor analysis of the order of sounds in words: identifying which words have a common sound at the beginning, end, or in the middle
• Trouble segmenting words into syllables and sounds
• Trouble deleting and substituting sounds in words
• Trouble blending sounds in words
• Poor listening comprehension
• Uses hand gestures and body language to help convey messages
• Does not understand or remember instructions

Reading Decoding

• Problem associating letters with sounds
• Makes sound-sequencing errors, as in reading snug for sung
• Sound-sequencing problems cause word analysis problems in reading
• Slow reading (due to slow sound retrieval and sequencing)
• Oral reading deteriorates within a few sentences (due to declining ability to retrieve sounds from memory)
• Poor comprehension of what has been read due to language comprehension weaknesses

Writing

• Spelling can be bizarre (not phonetic)
• Short and incomplete written assignments; brief sentences and limited vocabulary
• Poorly organized ideas in written assignments; not logically presented
• Little theme development; writes bare lists of facts or events rather than developing ideas, characters, or plot

Math

• Slow on math fact drills due to retrieval problems (word-finding problem)
• Difficulty with word problems due to poor language comprehension
• Problems with higher-level math due to difficulties with analysis and logical reasoning