LANGUAGE IN INDIA

DIVERSITIES IN THE SPEECH AND LANGUAGE SKILLS AMONG CHILDREN WITH DEVELOPMENTAL GERSTMANN'S SYNDROME
A SUBGROUP OF LEARNING DISABILITY
Swapna Sebastian, Ph.D.
Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D.

DISSOCIATION OF ORAL AND WRITTEN ABILITIES

The present study reveals the details of five children with Developmental Gerstmann's syndrome (DGS), a subgroup of Learning disability. There were diversities noticed in terms of their speech and language characteristics. A multidisciplinary team consisting of a Neurologist, a Speech Language Pathologist and a Psychologist at the Institute for Cognitive and Communicative Neuro Sciences (ICCONS) assessed the children.

A dissociation of oral language ability, writing ability and reading ability was noticed among these children. One child showed normal speech and language milestones with normal or better reading ability, but the child had dysgraphia equal in degree to dyscalculia. Three other children presented with a history of developmental dysphasia. Not all children with DGS fail to learn to read at appropriate time. Associated dyslexia was found in 3/5 patients.

ORDER ERRORS

Order errors and their script characterized spelling by malorientation of individual letters. All the 5 children described are bilinguals with Malayalam as mother tongue and English as second language. These children made similar errors in both languages. Children classified as DGS are not homogenous and hence will require different remedial strategies. Early identification and intervention of these children is crucial. This is more important in the scenario of Indian culture and education where the students are forced to be biliterate , which further increases the constraints.

DETAILED CASE STUDIES

Several cases of the occurrence of this syndrome were studied and reported in this study.

For example, CASE 4 was a twelve-year-old boy with a history of poor scholastic performance. He was born of a nonconsanguinous parentage at full term. The developmental motor and language milestones were normal. The major problems observed were difficulty in writing, reading, and doing calculations. General physical examination was unremarkable except that he had right-left disorientation and finger anomia, agraphia and acalculia. Detailed speech and language analysis revealed his expressive and comprehensive levels to be adequate for the age .His mother tongue was Malayalam. Writing was characterized by orthographic errors, spelling errors due to substitution and omission, phonological spelling etc. He had confusion between uppercase and lower case. He could not write sentences. His reading showed reversals "bib"for "did", sequential errors "guhe" for "huge". He couldn't draw simple figures. He could not do mental calculation or simple subtractions. On WISC the child scored a verbal IQ of 85.8 and performance IQ of 76.8.

OUR GOAL FOR THE FUTURE

Ultimately our goal is to map the characteristics applied to children speaking a variety of Indian languages.

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Swapna Sebastian
Shyamala Chengappa

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