Speech comprehension is the ability to grasp the meaning and significance of vocal utterances. By phonetic utterances are meant on the one hand words, but also onomatopoeias, such as "woof-woof" meant.
What skills must a child possess?
Disturbance in language comprehension
Children who have a language comprehension disorder are unable to understand the content of instructions, explanations, sentences, and conversations, or to. insufficient understanding.
You can usually tell a speech comprehension disorder just by looking at a child’s reaction. You cannot directly observe a speech comprehension disorder.
When there is a disorder in speech comprehension, the active use of language is always disturbed as well.
Symptoms of a speech comprehension disorder
The children may show the following leading symptoms:
Why is a disorder in language comprehension problematic?
A disorder in speech comprehension can remain undetected for a long time. Children with a disorder in language comprehension often develop strategies to compensate for this disorder.
By observing their environment, they can find out facts of the case. Calls for certain courses of action that recur repeatedly, they can implement. Their reaction fits the situation.
For example, when setting the table: "Please take the plates out of the cupboard and put them on the table."
If the child is given a demonstration of this action, the child can understand the meaning of this request from the observation and, if he or she agrees to the punishment, the child can be punished.
If the child is regularly asked to do this action, he or she no longer needs a demonstration, as the meaning of the request can be inferred from the context.
That is why parents can hardly or not at all recognize a disturbance in speech comprehension primarily.
When asked if their child understands everything, they understandably answer "yes".
Forms of speech comprehension disorders
Disturbance in speech comprehension on the word level
Affected children cannot assign a meaning to individual words.
Depending on the stage of development, even elementary everyday vocabulary is affected, such as.B. "cup " or "soft".
Later it affects only less frequently occurring words. It depends on the individual experience of the child, which words belong to it (for example tweezers).
Children have particular difficulties when.
Impairment in speech comprehension at the sentence level
Affected children have difficulty understanding the content of a sentence, even though they know the words it contains.
Sentence structure can lead to misunderstandings in affected children (for example, "You can put on your cap after you put on your jacket". With the best intention to do everything right, the child puts on the cap. He does not understand that he should have put on the jacket first.)
Children affected by a speech comprehension disorder can usually only process a limited amount of information per sentence.
Understanding text content (stringing together several sentences) is particularly difficult for affected children because.