Specific Language Dysfunctioning in Children: A Historical Overview

Abstract

The origins and growth of awareness of specific impairments in the linguistic functioning of children may be looked at in terms of three roughly chronological but overlapping and ongoing aspects: clinical recognition, conceptualization, and classification. The first aspect is characterized by the discovery, mainly during the first third of this century, that a population of children existed in facilities for the mentally deficient or the deaf who were neither imbecilic nor hard of hearing. Rather, these children displayed what appeared as circumscribed aberrations in the development and use of their native language, but they were relatively normal in other respects. On the basis of the paucity of published studies, the occurrence of such cases was thought to be something of a rarity. Gradually, an increasing number of writers reported such cases, and detailed accounts of directly observable symptoms grew. As more probing questions were posed, more thorough examinations appeared in the literature, and inferences were made regarding the specific nature of the linguistic defects and their etiology. Thus emerged the second aspect—theoretical conceptualization.