Nouvelles normalités Nouvelles pathologies Nouvelles ... - Psynem

6° 6éme Congresso Congrès Européen Europeo de di Psicopatologia Psychopathologie dell’Infanzia de l’Enfance e et dell’Adolescenza
de l’Adolescence
Nuove Nouvelles normalità normalités Nuove Nouvelles patologie pathologies Nuove pratiche Nouvelles pratiques
FRIDAY, May 6 WORKSHOPS
Workshop 14 Dal prenatale alla diagnosi precoce
A PILOT STUDY OF A NOVEL MEASUREMENT OF ASSESSING COMMUNICATIVE-LINGUISTIC
PROFILE IN CHILDREN WITH LANGUAGE DELAY AND PDD
D. Sarti, G. Airaghi, S. Magazù, MR. Scopelliti, F. Perego, F. Riva, G. Baranello, B. Molteni
Developmental Neurology Unit, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Neurologico "Carlo Besta", Milano (Milano - IT)
Language delay may be a symptom of a wide
range of developmental disorders in infancy,
including autistic spectrum disorders and SLI.
As a consequence early differential diagnosis
among SLI and other neurodevelopmental disorders
(i.e. Pervasive Developmental Disorder
PDD-nos) results particularly complex because
of the overlapping clinical features of these disorders
at an early age. So far, studies performed
with the purpose to identify early indicators for
early differential diagnosis between these conditions
have generally compared the groups of
infants using standardized tests, not natural
observations, despite the well documented
attention deficiency in such children. In addition,
these children often have little or no vocal output
and it is not possible to administer any language
test.
In the last decades indirect measurements, in
the form of questionnaires completed by the
parents, have been widely used both for clinical
and for research purposes. Although such questionnaires
are extremely useful, they are not sufficient
for an in-depth assessment of the child’s
verbal and non-verbal communication skills, and
clinicians usually need to use direct observation
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methods to collect an ample and reliable body
of data.
We present a novel measurement of assessing
communicative-linguistic profile of children, the
Dynamic Communication Evaluation (DCE), a
coding scheme that allows to analyse the means,
roles, purposes and syntactic level of children
communication in a unstructured parent-child
interaction.
We selected 20 children showing a severe
expressive language delay at first observation,
10 with PDDnos and 10 with SLI, and retrospectively
analyzed data from DCE performed at a
mean age of 37 months (T0) and at follow up
(T1, mean age 52 months.
We found different communicative-linguistic
profiles and trajectories among the 2 groups;
our results may provide useful information for
the early diagnosis in children with severe
speech and communication delay whose diagnosis
between PDDnos and SLI is often unclear
at an early age, also allowing a better planning
of precocious rehabilitation programmes and
evaluation of their efficacy.