The Shape of Language Impairment
Children with language impairment tend to be identified relatively late in the pre-school period. Early diagnosis is complicated by the variability attending early typical language development, and the concomitant difficulty of constructing valid and reliable assessment protocols. There is a particular problem in distinguishing two categories of late talkers. One group will continue to lag behind their peers, but another group has bee referred to as ‘late bloomers’. These are children who start slowly but will rapidly catch up. In this paper we address this issue via a longitudinal study of Irish-speaking children between 18 and 40 months. After outlining the general profile of Irish language development that the research reveals, we focus on two children in the group who meet the definition of late talkers – less than 50 words in their vocabulary at age two years. Data from an Irish CDI and from language samples will be mined to compare and contrast these children’s profiles, and to endeavour to identify those lexical and grammatical features which distinguish them.
