LANGUAGE IN INDIA

MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE AND SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY
IN THE SPEECH OF THE CEREBRAL PALSIED

Shyamala Chengappa, Ph.D.
Sapna Bhat, Ph.D. &
Nandini Iyer, M.Sc. (Speech and Hearing)

MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCES IN CHILDREN

Communication is the most essential base for getting along with others and for satisfying both intra and interpersonal needs. The pattern of language development is sequential universally, unless and until interference is caused due to any sensory or motor deficits, the cognition also plays a very important role in the language acquisition.

Present study aimed at comparing the mean length of utterance values of the normal (4-11 yrs) with that of cerebral palsied. Brown (1973) first found that at comparable MLU's children used the same grammatical structures up to the MLU of about 4. He observed that chronological age was not a good predictor of language development, this he said after analyzing longitudinally, the speech samples of 3 children-Adam, Eve and Sarah. Brown's stages are designated with Roman numerals and are as follows:

Stage I: Semantic roles and syntactic relations (MLU 1.0 - 2.0 morphemes or 1.75 morphemes). Here child puts noun-verb sequences together.

Stage II: Grammatical morphemes and modulation meaning (MLU = 2.0 - 2.5 with average of 2.25 morphemes). The child starts to change word endings to portray grammar.

Stage III: Modalities of simple sentences (MLU = 2.5 - 3.25 with average of 2.75 morphemes). The child begins to use questions and imperatives.

Stage IV: Embedding (MLU = 3.25 - 3.75 with average of 3.5 morphemes). The child begins to use complex sentences.

Stage V: Co-ordination (MLU = 3.75 - 4.25 with average of 4 morphemes). The child may use connectors and more functions.

LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENTS IN THE CEREBRAL PALSIED CHILDREN

Language impairments in the cerebral palsied children were overlooked until recently, because of the very obvious disruptions of speech. Among the speech and language problems found in the group of cerebral palsied, Denhoff and Robinavlt (1968) reported delayed speech, agraphia, anomia, alexia, stuttering and voice disorders. Myers (1965) studied the language ability of a large group of spastic and athetoid types of cerebral palsied. He found spastic to be superior to athetoids on tasks involving the automatic sequential level whereas the athetoids were superior on language tasks at the representational level.

A comparative study of grammatical development in normals and cerebral palsied children was conducted by Singer (1976). Spontaneous responses were recorded and categorized using a list of 87 grammatical forms. Each of these forms was scored as being present or absent in each child. A total number of points earned out of 87 were the competence. The data revealed that the cerebral palsied children did not speak less during a given unit of time but used fewer age appropriate and more agrammatical forms than the ones used by non-brain injured. The brain-injured children in this study did not appear to acquire many of grammatical strategies even with advancing age.

INDIAN STUDIES ON THE SPEECH-LANGUAGE OF THE CEREBRAL PALSIED CHILDREN

Indian studies are few and far in between, Ananthamurthy (1972) found that delayed speech was predominant among the cerebral palsied population. He did not discuss the details of the speech and language disorder in detail. First attempt to explore the speech and language characteristics of cerebral palsied was made by Shyamala (1987). She studied cerebral palsied children, grouped into spastic, quadriplegics, and athetoids using spontaneous and elicited speech and language samples. Poor intelligibility and dysarthria characterized the speech of the cerebral palsied, other specific characteristics were limited grammatical categories, limited lexicon, deficient phonology, deficient lexicon, deficient phonology, deficient grammatical categorizes and disfluency in speech, etc. The differences among subgroups were evident at phonological level more than other levels.

Thus, as is evident from the review, the speech-language characteristics of cerebral palsied have to be described and investigated in detail. This study aims at studying the MLU and syntactic complexity in cerebral palsied children.

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