Non‐specific nature of specific language impairment: a review of the literature with regard to concomitant motor impairments

Abstract

In the light of emerging suggestions that language and motor de cits may co-occur, the literature on speci c language impairment (SLI) was reviewed to investigate the prevalence of co-morbidity between SLI and poor limb motor skill in children diagnosed with language impairments. An extensive literature search was undertaken and the subsequent ndings evaluated with particular reference to issues surrounding symptom co-occurrence, as well as to theoretical and aetiological accounts of SLI. Clearly substantial co-morbidity exists between SLI and poor motor skill, suggesting that SLI is not a speci c disorder of language, but rather that children with SLI experience a broader range of diYculties, of which motor incoordination is one. Current theoretical explanations of SLI do not account fully for such wide-ranging diYculties and it may be useful in the future to focus on a more detailed explanation in terms of shared cognitive processes or neuromaturational delay to understand further the nature of the disorder, to explain it theoretically and to deal with it practically.

Do nimble hands make for nimble lexicons? Fine motor skills predict knowledge of embodied vocabulary items

“…Moreover, there also appear to be links between motor skill and language development, in that children with a specific language disability tend to have lesser motor and FMS (Hill, 2001;Iverson, 2010).…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…As such, the motor profiles of these different conditions are yet to be fully ascertained (especially as all these studies have involved child samples), but the answer as to the specificity of motor disorder to autism would therefore at present have to be negative. If motor systems do play a role in higher cognitive function, the presence of motor deficits in developmental conditions such as SLI (Hill, 2001;Marton, 2009;McPhillips et al, 2014;Ullman & Pierpont, 2005;Zelaznik & Goffman, 2010), and the presence of higher cognitive deficits in conditions such as DCD (Asonitou, Koutsouki, Kourtessis, & Charitou, 2012;Dewey, Kaplan, Crawford, & Wilson, 2002;Wilson & McKenzie, 1998), is unsurprising. In the above paragraphs, we begin to observe, for example in the studies of movement planning, that movement disorder can result from disruption at one or several stages in the cognitive and underlying neural chain of movement production.…”

Movimiento y lenguaje: Análisis de las relaciones entre el desarrollo motor y del lenguaje en la infancia. [Movement and language: Analysis of the relationships between motor and language development in children].

“…Esta tendencia se ha ido demostrando en sucesivas investigaciones, ya que otros estudios como los realizados por Haynes y Naidoo (1991) o por Trauner, Wulfeck, Tallal y Hesselink (2000) pudieron constatar como los niños con dificultades en el desarrollo del lenguaje mostraban también un retraso en la adquisición de la marcha independiente. Iverson y Barddock (2010) también constataron como los niños preescolares con dificultades del lenguaje también manifestaban dificultades en su competencia motriz, como ya lo había destacado Hill (2001). Para estos investigadores (Iverson y Barddock, 2010) este tipo de resultados confirmaban lo que denominaron la presencia simultánea de problemas motrices y problemas de lenguaje en poblaciones que pudieran presentar problemas motrices y/o de lenguaje, reflejando las estrechas relaciones que existían entre estas dos dimensiones del desarrollo.…”

“…Los resultados mostraron que el rendimiento en las pruebas de los dos grupos con dificultades fue equivalente al del grupo más joven, mostrando que tenían verdaderos problemas para reproducir acciones familiares. Posteriomente, esta misma investigadora (Hill, 2001) analizó la presencia de problemas motrices entre los niños con trastornos específicos del lenguaje, encontrando que existía una comorbilidad, ya que estos trastornos del lenguaje no eran tan específicos sino que estos niños presentaban un cuadro de dificultades más amplio, entre las que se encontraban los problemas de cooordinación motriz.…”