Speech disorders in children with mental retardation

Mental retardation (MR) in children is characterized by reduced development of intelligence due to insufficient functioning of the brain and central nervous system. Higher mental activity lags behind in development, provoking social maladjustment. Signs of UD appear in all areas - intellectual, speech, psychomotor, emotional. Experts consider the diagnosis of UO to include intrauterine damage to the brain and nervous system, or one that occurred in the first months of life. The degree of retardation of the child depends on the level of damage to the central nervous system.

Causes of mental retardation

Mental retardation in children is largely determined by genetics. However, heredity alone is rarely the only cause of mental retardation. Unfavorable environmental factors can also have a great influence on the formation of higher mental activity.

It is customary to highlight several reasons:

Chromosomal abnormalities, burdened heredity.
Damage to the fetus during intrauterine development (severe infectious diseases suffered by the mother, exposure to toxins, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, drugs, alcohol).
Brain hypoxia during gestation or childbirth.
Difficult labor (with asphyxia, forceps, etc.)
Significant prematurity of the child.
Social factors (deprivation, deep pedagogical neglect.
At an early age - TBI, infections affecting the central nervous system.

Article:

A characteristic feature of mentally retarded children is late development of speech.
A sharp lag is observed already in the period of pre-speech vocalizations. If normally spontaneous babbling in children appears in the period from 4 to 8 months, then in mentally retarded children babbling is observed in the period from 12 to 24 months (Petrova V.G.). In 40.0% of retarded children, their first words appear later than 3 years (Zeeman M.). Babbling in mentally retarded children appears at 20.8 months (normally at 4-8 months), the first words - in the period from 2.5 to 5 years. Normally, the appearance of children's first words occurs between 10 and 18 months.

A particularly significant lag is observed in mentally retarded children in the development of phrasal speech. Phrases appear in mentally retarded children at 89.4 months. Moreover, the time interval between the appearance of the first words and phrasal speech in mentally retarded children is longer than in normal children (Petrova V.G.).

Features of the speech development of mentally retarded children in the psychological and pedagogical aspect have been deeply studied by many authors (Aksenova A.K., Barskaya N.M., Vavina L.S., Voronkova V.V., Gaifullin A.U., Gnezdilov M.F. . , Gorlova L.A., Gruzintseva E.N., Danilkina G.I., Ermilova N.G., Zhuravleva R.Ya., Zavyalova E.N., Kolomytkina I.V., Meerson Y.A., Ozolaite V.A., Petrova V.G., Puoshlene Z.P., Smirnova Z.N., Sorokina N.K., Troshin G.Y., Khoruzhaya M.N.). These authors note the qualitative uniqueness of the oral and written speech of these children.

Mentally retarded children have speech impairments much more often than normal. Speech disorders in this category of children were studied from a speech therapy aspect by L.I. Aleksina, E.I. Butskova, E.M. Gopichenko, E.M. Gopichenko and B.F. Sobotovich, M. Zeeman, K.K. Karlep, R.I. Lalaeva, D.I. Orlova, A.A. Popova, M.A. Savchenko, L.A. Smirnova, E.F.S obotovich, N.A. Sharapanovskaya, R.A. Yurovoy.

According to various authors, in the primary grades of auxiliary schools, severe speech defects are observed in 40.0-60.0% of children. In the very first grades of the auxiliary school, according to M.E. Khvatseva, G.A. Kashe, the number of children with speech defects reaches 80.0%. At the same time, according to M.E. Khvattseva, in the primary grades of a public school there are only 17.0% of students with speech impairments. According to K.A. Omelchenko, only 7.4% of primary school students have some type of speech pathology.

The most common oral speech disorders in auxiliary schools are defects in sound pronunciation; rhinolalia and stuttering are less common (Becker K., Sovak M., Khvattsev M.E.).

A number of studies naturally raise the question of whether it is possible to talk about speech disorders in mentally retarded children or whether the speech of mentally retarded children is completely determined by the level of their mental development (Becker K., Sovak M.).

A number of authors believe that the level of speech underdevelopment of a mentally retarded child depends only on the degree of decline in intelligence. This point of view is currently subject to justified criticism.

Cognitive and speech development are closely related to each other, but at the same time, the development of cognitive activity and speech is characterized by specific features (Vygotsky L.S., Zhinkin N.I., Dubovsky V.M., Luria A.R., Lyublinskaya A.A. , Piaget J., Rubinstein S.L.). Speech development is broadly based on the development of cognitive activity, but should not be confused with it. It is known that the level of speech development of children with idiocy, imbecility, and debility varies significantly. A decrease in intellectual development negatively affects the process of speech development. However, there is no obvious direct correlation between the degree of decline in intelligence and the level of speech development. Thus, among children with mental retardation to the degree of debility, a certain proportion of children have a sufficient level of development of impressive and expressive speech. Another part of the children has a much lower level of speech development, which is combined with a variety of speech disorders. The level of speech underdevelopment of a large part of mentally retarded children is much lower than their mental development allows.

In this regard, two groups of oligophrenia are distinguished (Sukhareva G.E., Belova-David R.I.):

1) Oligophrenia with speech underdevelopment.

2) Atypical oligophrenia, complicated by a speech disorder.

Thus, some mentally retarded children have speech underdevelopment, which is entirely determined by the level of intellectual underdevelopment, while the majority of these children, especially preschool and primary school age, have a severe disorder of speech development, including various speech disorders,

Children suffering from mental retardation can experience all forms of speech disorders that also occur in normal children (dyslalia, dysarthria, rhinolalia, dysphonia, dyslexia, dysgraphia, stuttering, etc.), but these disorders are more numerous in mentally retarded children and heavy, characterized by originality (Zeeman M., Khvattsev M.E.).

Speech disorders in mentally retarded children are secondary, depending on the underdevelopment of cognitive activity (Petrova V.G., Sobotovich E.F.) Researchers identify 3 levels of speech underdevelopment in mentally retarded children:

Level 1. The child has difficulty understanding speech. There are only isolated words in his speech. Verbal deficiency is compensated by the use of gestures.

Level 2. The child has difficulty understanding speech. At this level, the child organizes speech grammatically, combining words into short phrases, can write individual words, but is not able to compose a coherent story.

Level 3. Comprehension of reading texts is limited. The child constructs phrases correctly, but the sentences are stereotyped and vary little. The vocabulary is poor. The child can write simple words and short phrases correctly. The written stories show pronounced disturbances.

It should be noted that the identified levels do not sufficiently reflect the qualitative uniqueness of the speech development of a mentally retarded child. To a large extent, they can also be attributed to the dynamics of speech development in children with delayed speech development, with alalia, etc. It is reasonable to highlight various difficulties in understanding speech, which are most typical for mentally retarded children.

In mentally retarded children, there is a violation of the acquisition of a number of speech functions (Vygotsky L.S., Luria A.R., Lubovsky V.I., Petrova V.G.).

Speech, according to L.S. Vygotsky, represents the unity of communication and generalization. In this regard, the leading, communicative and cognitive functions of speech are distinguished. Along with these basic functions, there is an emotive function (expression of emotions and feelings), pragmatic (expression of requests and orders), informative (statement about factual data), regulating function of speech, etc. All functions of speech are formed in close interrelation. However, in a separate speech utterance the specific weight of each function is different. The functions of speech are genetically independent, and the onset of speech development is motivated by the pragmatic function. The informative (symbolic) function of speech develops only after 2 years, and the regulatory function of speech develops in children even later.

For mentally retarded children, the speech signal is significant, but its meaning is determined by the emotive and pragmatic function to a greater extent than by the informative function. Mentally retarded children spontaneously use speech more to express their emotions and requests than to inform about facts. These children use speech for communication, but not to regulate their behavior (Luria A.R., Lubovsky V.I.). At the same time, the communicative function of speech in these children is characterized by certain features (Petrova V.G.).

Mentally retarded children have difficulty using speech in the process of solving mental problems. They use speech less often than normal children to spontaneously verbalize experimental tasks and encode data. These children prefer to perform actions without speech interference. The use of verbalization in the process of problem solving by mentally retarded children has a negative result. The result is better if the verbal response is replaced by a nonverbal one.

In an experiment conducted by O'Konnor, children were asked to differentiate between pairs of cells that were different in absolute size and similar in relative size. The authors concluded that mentally retarded children perform this task more quickly than normal children. O'Connor explains this by saying that normal children begin to verbalize the principle of solving a discrimination problem, and this slows down the solution process. This does not happen in mentally retarded children, since they do not verbalize the task. If a mentally retarded person is led to verbalize the principle of the solution, they need more trials to approach the solution of the problem. The intervention of speech in the process of problem solving has different effects in normal and mentally retarded children. For normal children, speech helps in solving similar problems and promotes transfer of methods. At the same time, if a mentally retarded person is stimulated to verbalize when solving a problem (under conditions of transfer of the solution principle), they either stereotypically repeat verbalization or stop it during the solution phase.

This speech impediment is even more evident when verbal and nonverbal activities are examined. So P. Bryant came to the conclusion that it is easier for mentally retarded children to distribute pictures into different boxes than to give them different names.

Speech disorders in mentally retarded children are characterized by persistence; they are difficult to correct, persisting until the senior grades of auxiliary schools (Zeeman M., Khvattsev M.E., Kashe G.A., Petrova V.G.).

In general, it can be noted that the issues of manifestation, mechanisms, structure of oral speech disorders and methods of their correction in mentally retarded children are presented unequally in the literature.

The features of speech development of mentally retarded schoolchildren in the psychological and pedagogical aspect have been deeply and comprehensively studied by many authors. The problem of speech underdevelopment in these children is considered from the point of view of concepts about general and particular patterns of development of abnormal children, about the need for the development of higher mental functions, about the close connection between mental and speech development, about the potential development possibilities of mentally retarded children.

Multilateral psychological and pedagogical research into the possibilities of teaching mentally retarded children and the psychological characteristics of their development made it possible to determine a system of education in auxiliary schools, during which an important place is given to speech development. The auxiliary school programs widely present the tasks and content of work on speech development in close connection with the process of cognition of the surrounding world, with the development of analytical and synthetic activity. Taking into account the psychological characteristics of mentally retarded children, a methodology for developing speech in reading lessons, speech development, the Russian language, etc., and a methodology for teaching the Russian language have been developed.

However, the problem of speech disorders and their correction in the speech therapy aspect is insufficiently studied. The data presented in the speech therapy literature comes down to a description of the symptoms of individual speech disorders (dyslalia, dysgraphia, dyslexia), to determining the nature and degree of immaturity of individual components of speech (phonetic-phonemic, lexical-grammatical aspects of speech). The correctional and speech therapy aspect of the problem is presented only in the method of eliminating violations of the phonetic-phonemic aspect of speech.

Analysis of publications on speech disorders and their correction in mentally retarded children allows us to highlight the following unresolved issues of this problem.

– Until now, there is no differentiation in the literature of mentally retarded children according to qualitatively different types of their speech development.

– The structure of the systemic speech defect in these children has not been determined.

– The mechanisms of speech disorders in auxiliary school students have not been identified.

– Until now, the speech therapy literature has not fully defined the tasks, program and content of speech therapy work in a auxiliary school; a scientifically based method for correcting systemic speech disorders in mentally retarded children has not been developed in a complex of influences on all levels of speech activity, on all components of speech, in close connection with the development of analytical and synthetic activities.

Manifestations of UO

Mental retardation in a child manifests itself from an early age. It is expressed in reduced intelligence, sensory and motor disorders, and delayed speech formation. Depending on the degree of retardation, the child’s ability to learn, develop and be able to integrate into society is determined. The good news in this case is the fact that MR does not progress over time, and in the case of correctly carried out corrective measures, the condition even improves. However, it must be remembered that a child is capable of developing only within the limits of physiological capabilities. What stands out most clearly is the decline in intelligence and speech development. But for any level of adaptation, formed speech is extremely important. Therefore, one of the most important areas in the correction of children with disabilities is classes with a speech therapist-defectologist.

Children with mental retardation: developmental features, learning requirements.

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author: Kuznetsova Albina Khasmullaevna

Primary school teacher MCOU "Special correctional boarding school No. 152", Novosibirsk

Children with mental retardation: developmental features, learning requirements.

Children with mental retardation: developmental features, learning requirements.

The development of cognitive processes of children studying in a correctional school is an important condition for correctional education. This is explained by social and humanistic trends in modern society, throughout the world and in Russia in particular. A mentally retarded child is characterized by researchers as a general underdevelopment and mental abilities are naturally formed in him with great delays. Society must ensure that such a child grows up and enters adulthood without any problems. To do this, it is necessary to study in detail the issues of the formation of cognitive processes and interest in learning in children with intellectual disabilities.

The cognitive processes of mentally retarded children are formed in conditions of defective sensory cognition, speech underdevelopment, limited practical activity, therefore their mental operations develop slowly and have unique features.

Such domestic scientists as L.V. Zankov, A.I. Lipkina, E.M. Kudryavtseva, I.M. Solovyov, Zh.I. studied the cognitive processes of mentally retarded children. Schiff, M.S. Pevzner and many other authors.

The concept of a mentally retarded child

includes a very heterogeneous group of children who are united by the presence of brain damage.

In accordance with the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision (ICD - 10):

Mental retardation

- these are states of delayed or incomplete development of the psyche, which is primarily characterized by a violation of abilities that manifest themselves during the period of maturation and provide the general level of intelligence, i.e. cognitive, speech, motor and social abilities.

Other sources define the term mental retardation as follows:

Mental retardation

- this is a persistent, irreversible impairment of cognitive activity, all mental functions with particular underdevelopment of abstract and logical thinking, arising as a result of organic damage to the brain.

Causes of mental retardation

Endogenous (or internal) causes are divided into three groups:

- prenatal (before the birth of the child): this can be a mother’s illness, nervous breakdowns, injuries, heredity;

- natal (the moment of childbirth): this could be a difficult birth, too fast a birth, or medical intervention;

- postnatal (after birth): for example, the child bumped or fell.

Exogenous (or external) reasons: reasons of a socio-biological nature - this is the environment, tobacco smoking, drug addiction, alcoholism, AIDS.

Defect structure:

Irreversible underdevelopment of the brain with a predominantly immature cortex

Underdevelopment of mental activity itself

Underdevelopment of motivational-volitional and emotional components

Insufficiency of higher mental functions

Children with mental retardation are characterized by persistent disturbances in all mental activity, especially clearly manifested in the sphere of cognitive processes. Moreover, there is not only a lag from the norm, but also a deep originality of both personal manifestations and cognition. Thus, the mentally retarded cannot in any way be equated with normally developing children of a younger age.

Such children are capable of development, although development is slow, but it makes qualitative changes in the mental activity of children, in their personal sphere.

Features of cognitive processes of mentally retarded schoolchildren:

Pathological inertia of nervous and mental processes;

Intellectual passivity, indifference to what is happening;

Decreased motivation for activity;

Stiffness, inertia and stereotypical thinking;

Impaired critical thinking;

Violation of the operational and organizational components of mental activity;

Insufficiency, undifferentiation and poverty of perception;

Low accuracy and strength of memorization;

Unintentional memorization;

Speech disorders;

Low focus of activity

Sensation and perception

Visual perception

students slowly. This means that in order to see and recognize a familiar object, primary school students need more time than their normally developing peers. This is an important feature that has a certain influence on children’s orientation in space and, probably, on the process of learning to read.

Perception is characterized by undifferentiation. When examining an object, children see it in general terms, without noticing specific features. It is especially difficult for mentally retarded children to actively adapt their perception to changing conditions. They incorrectly recognize inverted images of well-known objects, mistaking them for other objects in their usual position. A special issue is the perception of plot paintings by schoolchildren.

With a mild degree of UI: The volume of visual perception is narrowed, orientation is difficult.

With a moderate degree of disability: the development of the visual, auditory, tactile analyzers lags behind, anomalies of vision and hearing, and does not orient independently in the situation.

In severe degrees of MR: Perception is superficial, surrounding objects are perceived and differentiated satisfactorily.

With a deep degree of UO: The psyche is at low stages of development, it is difficult to navigate, and cannot distinguish edible from inedible.

Attention and memory

Researchers emphasize the essential role of attention in the performance of educational and work activities. Among the main disadvantages of attention

Mentally retarded schoolchildren have impaired concentration, stability, distribution, switchability and attention span. In students with intellectual disabilities, involuntary attention is somewhat more preserved than voluntary attention, but it is also unique. The attention of a mentally retarded child is directly dependent on the characteristics of his performance.

Education for mentally retarded children relies more on memory processes,

which has many unique features. The amount of material memorized by students with disabilities is significantly less than that of their typically developing peers.

Thus, students remember rows of words less successfully than rows of pictures.

The accuracy and strength of memorization of both verbal and visual material is low.

Memorizing texts, even simple ones, suffers from imperfection among schoolchildren, since they are not sufficiently able to divide the material into paragraphs, highlight the main idea, identify supporting words and expressions, establish semantic connections between parts, etc. As a result, students retain only part of the material in their memory.

A very characteristic feature of students with learning disabilities is their inability to use well-learned material and reproduce the knowledge that is necessary to solve the specific task assigned to them.

It is essential to characterize the memory of mentally retarded students, as well as to substantiate a favorable prognosis for their development, that they are able to remember material that they understand with great success.

With a mild degree of UO: The amount of attention is reduced, the concentration of attention is worse, voluntary attention is unstable; not stable memorization, rapid forgetting, mechanical memory is formed.

With a moderate degree of ES: Unstable attention, memory is insufficiently developed, voluntary memorization is impaired, mechanical memory suffers.

In severe cases of MR: Attention is seriously impaired, memory capacity is low.

With a deep degree of MR: Attention and memory are not developed.

Thinking

- a generalized, indirect reflection of the external world and its laws, a socially conditioned process of cognition, its highest level. It is carried out using mental operations (analysis, synthesis, generalization, classification, abstraction, comparison).

It has sequentially arising in the child’s ontogenesis and then interacting practically effective, visual-figurative and verbal-logical forms.

Mentally retarded primary schoolchildren exhibit insufficiency at all levels of mental activity. They are made difficult by solving the simplest practical problems, such as combining an image of a familiar object cut into 2-3 parts, or choosing a geometric figure identical in shape and size to the given one.

Students in grades 1-2 experience even greater difficulties in tasks involving the use of visual-figurative thinking. The greatest difficulty is presented by tasks that require students to use verbal and logical thinking, such as understanding simple texts containing certain dependencies - temporary, causal, etc. Children perceive the material in a simplified way, omit a lot, change the sequence of semantic links, do not establish necessary relationships between them.

The thought processes of mentally retarded primary schoolchildren are very unique.

The mental analysis they perform of a visually perceived real object or its image is characterized by poverty and fragmentation. The analysis of objects will be more detailed if it is performed with the help of an adult - based on his questions.

An even more difficult task for mentally retarded students is to generalize objects or phenomena, that is, to unite them on the basis of an identified common feature that is essential for all of them.

With a mild degree of UI: The ability for abstract thinking is limited. Relative preservation of visual-figurative thinking

With a moderate degree of ER: There is no generalization, lack of understanding of the hidden meaning, or rote learning.

In severe cases, VR: Chaotic. Unsystematically. Lack of semantic connections.

With a deep degree of MR: Absence of elementary thinking processes

Speech

Communication is very important for a person’s social adaptation.

with other people, the ability to enter into a conversation and maintain it, i.e., a certain level of formation of dialogical speech is required. Primary school students rarely initiate dialogue. This is due to the underdevelopment of their speech, with a narrow range of interests and motives. They do not know how to listen sufficiently to what is asked of them, and do not always answer the question asked. In some cases they are silent, in others they answer inappropriately.

With a mild degree of UO: Speech delay (muteness, nasality, stuttering).

With a moderate degree of disability: speech delay of 3-5 years, tongue-tied, poor vocabulary.

In severe cases of UI: oral speech is underdeveloped, consists of individual words, the structure of words is disrupted, they use gestures and inarticulate sounds.

With a deep degree of UO: Speech is replaced by inarticulate sounds.

Peculiarities of personality development and emotional-volitional sphere of mentally retarded children

In the motivational-need sphere, the initial stage of formation. Interest is focused on current activities

Emotions lag behind in development. Instability of feelings (children with a mild degree of mental retardation have a good-natured attitude, while those with a severe degree of mental retardation have a more malicious and melancholy mood).

Self-esteem is subject to contrasting changes. The level of aspirations has been lowered. There is no competitiveness, no desire to achieve success.

Features of activity lie in the uniqueness of goals, motives, and means. Purposeful activity is impaired. Low performance, no role play.

Motivation

Many children with mild mental retardation are bright enough to attend mainstream schools, although they are more susceptible to feelings of helplessness and frustration, which further complicate their social and cognitive development. As a result, they begin to expect failure even at tasks they can handle; in the absence of proper training, their motivation to comply with new requirements decreases.

Consequently, compared with typically developing children of the same mental age, children with mental retardation expect less success, set low goals for themselves, and are content with minimal success when they can achieve more. Adults may unintentionally indulge this learned helplessness. When, for example, a child is considered "underachieving," adults are less likely to encourage him to persist in achieving a goal than if he were a normal child at the same level of cognitive development. This phenomenon explains some of the deficits found in the performance of children with mental retardation as they grow. This is especially true for tasks that require verbal processing skills, such as reading, writing, and problem solving.

Bibliography:

Borodulina S.Yu. Corrective pedagogy. – M., 2009.
Zabramnaya S.D. Psychological and pedagogical diagnostics of mental development of children. - M., 1993.
Fundamentals of special psychology / L. V. Kuznetsova, L. I. Peresleni, L. I. Solntseva, etc.; Ed. L. V. Kuznetsova. - M., 2002.
Petrova V.G., Belyakova I.V. Who are they, children with developmental disabilities? - M., 1998.
Rubinshtein S.Ya. Psychology of mentally retarded schoolchildren. - M., 1986.

Children with mental retardation: developmental features, learning requirements.

Features of speech development in children with mental retardation

With this diagnosis, disturbances in speech formation are usually systemic in nature - that is, most often the child has not developed all aspects of speech to one degree or another. More or less pronounced may be:

phonemic awareness disorders (more about phonemic speech disorder);
ungrammatical speech;
dysarthria;
delayed speech development;
formation of coherent speech.

Depending on the pronounced deviations, speech problems are divided into three levels:

The passive vocabulary is limited; the active vocabulary contains only a small set of simple words. The child expresses himself mainly through gestures.
Understanding speech is complicated; the child perceives only simple sentences. Active vocabulary has expanded to construct short phrases, but these phrases do not flow together into a coherent narrative.
The child constructs complex sentences, but they are ungrammatical and often stereotypical. Vocabulary is limited. There are reading and writing skills, but reading text comprehension is reduced, and written text has a lot of impairments.

Speech development in mentally retarded children

In the course of general psychology, speech is considered as a tool of thinking and a means of communication. Both in phylogenesis and ontogenesis, speech first acts as a means of communication, as well as designation, and later acquires the property of a tool with the help of which a person thinks and expresses his thoughts. “In a word, a thought is not only expressed, but also accomplished” (L. S. Vygotsky). Many extremely interesting monographs are devoted to the issues of the relationship between thinking and language (L. S. Vygotsky, A, G. Spirkin). Interesting reviews of the extensive literature on the development of children's speech are contained in the books of B. L. Rubinstein and D. B. Elkonin.

However, another approach to speech is possible - as a certain motor (as well as sound discrimination) skill or ability that arises as a result of the joint activity of analyzers. Of course, this is only one aspect of speech analysis, which should not be considered in isolation from the others. However, this aspect is especially relevant when considering the development of speech in mentally retarded children.

A healthy child of 3-4 years old already has a large vocabulary, his active speech is almost correct grammatically, and phonetic pronunciation errors remain only in the form of minor exceptions.

At the same time, in an oligophrenic child, both auditory discrimination and pronunciation of words and phrases arise much later. His speech is poor and incorrect. The main reasons that determined this state of speech are the weakness of the closure function of the cortex, the slow development of new differentiated conditioned connections in all analyzers, and sometimes mainly in any one. A significant negative role is also played by a general disturbance in the dynamics of nervous processes, which makes it difficult to establish dynamic stereotypes - connections between analyzers.

Underdevelopment of speech may be due primarily to slowly developing and unstable differentiated conditioned connections in the area of the auditory analyzer. Because of this, the child does not differentiate the speech sounds of the people around him for a long time, and does not learn new words and phrases for a long time. He is not deaf, he even hears a quiet rustle or an isolated sound uttered by his parents, but the sounds of coherent conversational speech addressed to him are perceived by him indiscriminately. (This is somewhat similar to how adults hear the speech of foreigners.) Such a child selects and distinguishes only a few words. The process of isolating these adequately perceived words from the speech of others occurs at a completely different, slower pace than normal. This is the first, main reason for the delayed and defective development of speech. But even further, when these words are already highlighted and recognized as familiar, well-known, they are still perceived unclearly.

Mentally retarded children have difficulty distinguishing similar sounds, especially consonants; therefore, if the teacher tells them, for example, that buds have appeared on a tree, they can hear in this consonance barrels, boskos, buds, etc. In preschool age, children’s mistakes, observed when they repeat new words, are usually regarded by others as only as pronunciation defects, of which, by the way, there really are a lot.

However, at school, in the process of teaching a child to write, it becomes possible to establish that many of his mistakes are due precisely to the insufficient development of the auditory analyzer.

The reason for this state of phonemic hearing is the same slow formation of differentiated conditional connections in the auditory analyzer. As students progress through school, these connections are more or less successfully formed. But the consequences of such delayed speech acquisition for the general mental development of children are very serious.

Deficiencies in phonemic hearing are aggravated by the slow pace of development of articulation, i.e., the set of movements necessary to pronounce words.

The development of all movements of a child, including the motor skills of his speech-motor apparatus, also depends on the peculiarities of the formation of differential conditioned reflex connections in the area of the motor analyzer. The motor impulses necessary to clearly pronounce certain sounds must be very accurate. The accuracy of these motor impulses can be ensured by a combination of two types of corrections: correction with the help of hearing (the child hears that he pronounces Be the way adults do, not the way it should be) and correction with the muscle sense (normally the child feels that the muscles of his speech motor apparatus make the wrong movement that is needed, that with such and such a movement the sound is not the same as needed). In an oligophrenic, both types of correction are imperfect.

Correct discrimination of sounds by ear usually contributes to correct pronunciation; the correctness of one’s own pronunciation, in turn, contributes to better differentiation of sounds by ear. With pathology of cortical activity and delayed formation of interanalyzer connections, the opposite relationship arises: insufficiency of auditory perceptions inhibits the improvement of pronunciation, and unclear pronunciation prevents the improvement of the quality of auditory perceptions.

Thus, the slow, defective development of analyzers leads to the fact that in mental retardation, as a rule, the development of speech is sharply delayed. By the time speech should be a means of communication, designation and an instrument of thinking, it finds itself in an extremely undeveloped state. Very often, with oligophrenia, the first individual words appear at 2-3 years, and short, meager and agrammatic phrases - at 5-6 years. Children enter their school years with severe underdevelopment of speech.

The speech deficiencies of mentally retarded schoolchildren have been studied very thoroughly by many Soviet psychologists (A. R. Luria, M. F. Gnezdilov, G. M. Dulnev, M. P. Kononova, V. G. Petrova). The great importance of speech defects for the general mental underdevelopment of children is shown in a special chapter of the book “Peculiarities of mental development of students in auxiliary schools.” This chapter provides a detailed summary of studies of a variety of indicators of speech development.

First of all, it turns out, as one would expect, that the vocabulary of students in the junior classes of the auxiliary school is significantly smaller than the vocabulary of their healthy peers. The difference between passive and active vocabulary, which exists normally, is especially great in oligophrenics. Their active vocabulary is particularly poor. Oligophrenic children use adjectives, verbs, and conjunctions very little.

Even the vocabulary that a auxiliary school student has already mastered remains incomplete for a long time, since the meaning of the words he uses for the most part does not correspond to the actual meaning of the word. This fact also occurs in every normal child. So, for example, a healthy small child can use the word pussy for a domestic cat, a fluffy teddy bear, or the collar of his mother’s coat. At first, uncle is every man except dad; Only gradually does the child learn the exact meaning of the word uncle, which expresses a certain degree of kinship. According to I.M. Sechenov, a word remains for a certain time not a concept for a child, but only a “nickname”, the name of several objects. Then there is a gradual clarification of its meaning.

The grammatical structure of speech among students in the first grades of the auxiliary school is extremely imperfect. Their phrases are monosyllabic. Children very rarely use subordinate sentences and find it very difficult to choose words to express shades of thought. During school years, mentally retarded children retain forms of speech that healthy children use at the age of 3-4, in particular situational speech, which does not fully reveal the content of thought and is therefore understandable only to those who know the situation. Children widely use pronouns, instead of naming the characters, they say that they “went there” or “we were there”, instead of explaining the location of the events or identifying the characters.

Violations of agreement in sentences are noteworthy. So, for example, V.G. Petrova gives the following examples of statements from auxiliary school students. He has no head. The boys made a snowman. I saw a squirrel in the forest. There are two possible reasons for such agrammatism in speech.

Firstly, it may be due to the fact that children do not learn to practically use different grammatical forms, since they do not hear differences in the endings of words due to undifferentiated speech perception.

Secondly, this may be due to the stiffness of nervous processes and their inhibition. The child begins a sentence with one thing in mind, but then, distracted by another thought, skips the end of what he started and moves on to the middle of the next thought. Phrase elements are skipped. Then the child’s ungrammatical phrase should be read like this: Squirrel... (jumped... I saw her) ... saw her in the forest. Another could mean the following: The boys made (...a skating rink... they put a lot of snow there...) snow... (they blinded...) a woman.

It may also be that, when starting to speak, the child did not have time to think through the end and on the go came up with a thought that turned out to be inconsistent with the beginning, but was put into the beginning grammatical form.

The auxiliary school helps students correct pronunciation deficiencies, contributes to a significant increase in vocabulary, and improves the grammatical structure of speech.

A auxiliary school teacher has to face considerable difficulties in teaching children to read and write.

Insufficient development of phonemic hearing, pronunciation defects, difficulty dividing words into sounds - all this leads to the fact that almost every word is spelled with errors. It is very difficult for a mentally retarded child to give letters the desired shape, which naturally causes difficulties in the formation of handwriting. When learning to write and read, defects in the visual analyzer and spatial orientation are detected. Children have difficulty distinguishing between the shapes of the letters p and n, etc. When writing, they write the letter c as the letter e or the letter w as the letter g, etc. In addition to mixing similar, but differently spatially located letters, children sometimes write in mirror images , i.e. from right to left, they lose lines when writing and reading.

All these difficulties, caused by the slow development of analyzers, are gradually being overcome.

However, among the mentally retarded there are children in whom, for one reason or another (local hemorrhage, bruise, locally limited meningoencephalitis), one of the analyzers is particularly retarded in its development. This can be detected exclusively when teaching children oral speech, writing, reading - sometimes also counting). In such cases, while continuing individual correctional work with the student, the teacher is forced to put up with his poor performance in a particular subject. From the course of oligophrenopedagogy it is known that children who do not perform well in one or another subject due to local brain defects must be transferred to the next class. Underdevelopment of speech and concrete thinking of mentally retarded children are interconnected and interdependent. Both of these phenomena arise as a consequence of disturbances in nervous processes. At the same time, being both consequences, these two phenomena are interdependent: underdevelopment of speech limits the further mental development of the child, and the difficulty of generalizations interferes with the correct assimilation of the meanings of words and the formation of speech as a whole. In other words, defects in thinking and speech mutually aggravate each other.

So far, a schematic description of the speech of oligophrenics has been given. Now let us briefly dwell on the speech characteristics of other categories of mentally retarded children.

With hydrocephalus (by no means in all cases, but only sometimes) there is a deceptive, apparently very good development of speech, which creates the illusion of premature good mental development of the child. The vocabulary is amazing in its abundance. These children sometimes use many very complex words and even scientific terms. The grammatical structure of speech is extensive and overly complete. The reasoning of these children is sometimes of a resonant, moralizing nature. The speech of these children is “empty”; they delve little into the meaning of what they say; in inappropriate situations they repeat everything that they have heard from others or read themselves. Their speech, while developing well as a skill, at the same time does not become either an instrument of thought or a means of genuine communication. This kind of speech development in mental retardation is a rare exception.

The speech of some children with schizophrenia can be just as unique, but somewhat different in form. The skill of correct understanding and pronunciation of words itself can be formed in them easily and sometimes even earlier than in healthy children. They master a sufficient vocabulary and can easily use complex grammatical structures of phrases. However, the speech of these children is impaired due to a changed personal position. For example, their speech is often distinguished by a special mannerism: statements are accompanied by peculiar antics, the voice is distorted, children speak squeaky or extremely quietly. In the speech of children with schizophrenia, unexpected distortions of ordinary words are sometimes encountered, as well as neologism words (newly composed or unlawfully transformed, merged, etc.).

With mental retardation resulting from rheumatism or brain injury, as a rule, there are no special difficulties in mastering oral speech, but mastering written speech, especially during the period of learning to write, can be very difficult. The fluctuations in attention characteristic of such children and the uneven pace of actions (a combination of impetuosity and slowness) lead to the fact that they have a large number of random errors: omissions and rearrangements of letters, words, unnecessary repetitions of syllables, accidental typos, etc.

Such children develop very poorly in handwriting: sweeping, uneven movements lead to handwriting remaining unsteady and careless for a very long time.

And finally, the speech of epileptic children is very peculiar. At first it is similar to the speech of oligophrenics. Gradually their speech becomes more and more viscous, viscous. These children tend to repeat the same words and figures of speech. Their stories are replete with unnecessary details. Epileptics inappropriately use diminutive endings (little pen, etc.)

Under the influence of schooling, the speech of all mentally retarded children begins to develop successfully. The vocabulary increases, pronunciation improves, the grammatical structure of speech becomes richer, more developed, and the need for verbal communication increases. Children listen to the teacher’s speech, strive to understand it, talk with each other, try to find precise wording in order to answer the lesson more successfully. But still, we must not forget that the tool of thinking, which in healthy children turns out to be formed long before entering school, in mentally retarded children emerges and improves only after entering a auxiliary school.

METHODS FOR STUDYING SPEECH Methods for examining the speech of children in order to identify various defects in the perception and pronunciation of speech sounds have been developed in detail in speech therapy. Therefore, it is inappropriate to present them here.

It should only be emphasized that, in addition to peculiarities or defects in perception and pronunciation, a psychological analysis of children’s speech should also reveal more complex indicators of its development.

These include the following:

lexicon;
grammatical structure;
completeness and adequacy of the meanings of the words used
the need for speech as a means of communication and an instrument of thought.

Vocabulary assessment can be done in a variety of ways. Passive vocabulary can be approximately determined by showing the child a large number of objects or objects (including people performing certain actions) and counting the number or percentage of names they name correctly.

Active vocabulary is more difficult to establish. For this purpose, conversations are held with the child based on pictures or on certain topics; then the words that were spoken during the conversation are counted (of course, identical, i.e., repeated words are excluded from this count).

Analysis of the grammatical structure of speech is usually carried out on the material of recordings of the child’s statements, that is, very approximately. Such features of speech are taken into account that are considered typical for situational speech (abundance of pronouns, vagueness of phrases in a conversation with people who do not know the situation in which the conversation is going on) or for contextual speech (completeness of phrases and clarity of names).

You should also pay attention to whether the child willingly maintains a conversation, whether he himself initiates the discussion of various topics or only answers questions, whether his answers are complete or monosyllabic, stingy. Monosyllabic, sparse answers do not necessarily indicate poor development of the student’s speech; sometimes this can be a manifestation of depression or a negative attitude towards the interlocutor.

Literature 1. Vygotsky L. S. Thinking and speech - In the book - Selected psychological studies M, 1956 2. Petrova V. G. Speech of mentally retarded schoolchildren. - In the book: Features of mental development of students in auxiliary schools M, 1965, ch. V.

International magazine

One of the main characteristics of a child’s overall development is the formation and development of speech. Children who develop normally have good language acquisition abilities. Speech is an important means of communication between a child and the world around him, the most perfect form of communication that is inherent only to humans. Speech is a special higher mental function that is provided by the brain; any deviations in the development of speech must be noticed in time. For speech to function normally, it is necessary for the cerebral cortex to reach a certain maturity, for the articulation apparatus to be formed and for hearing to be preserved [1].

For a long time, science was not interested in the problems of studying the characteristics of the development of children's speech.

The first work that describes the psychological development of one boy was the book of the German philosopher Tiedemann, “Observation of the Development of the Mental Abilities of a Child,” published in 1787 and provoked a wave of interest in the topic of children and the study of the characteristics of the language and speech of children. After “Observations,” a number of publications were published that describe researchers’ observations of the speech development of their children.

At the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, state interest in the study of children's speech arose: institutions were organized that deal with the study of speech ontogenesis, special literature was published, and methodological approaches to conducting research were improved.

However, in 1936, the Decree of the Central Committee “On pedagogical perversions in the Narkompros system” suspended the development of the scientific direction for studying the development of children's speech. And only in 1950, with the flourishing of psycholinguistics, the following significant works in this direction will appear.

Currently, a lot of research is being carried out in this direction, which has received great development in our country and abroad.

The reasons for the delay in speech development are the pathology of pregnancy and childbirth, the general lag in the mental development of the child, the influence of heredity and genetics.

Some features of the formation of speech skills at different stages of the development of a child’s speech, which are reflected in the works of psycholinguists, give us the opportunity to trace the uniqueness of deviations and anomalies characteristic of the speech development of children with intellectual disabilities [2].

Mental retardation is a persistent, irreversible impairment of cognitive activity, as well as emotional-volitional and behavioral spheres. Among people with intellectual disabilities, the majority are people diagnosed with mental retardation.

Depending on the lack of intelligence in children diagnosed with oligophrenia, three groups are distinguished: idiocy - severe; imbecility – less severe; debility is relatively mild [3].

When diagnosed with idiocy, a sharp disturbance in mental and physical development is observed, endocrine disorders and deformities in the structure of the skull and skeleton appear. Speech development in deep forms of idiocy consists of pronouncing individual sounds or pronouncing a limited number of words with distortion. The behavior of idiots shows sharp deviations from the norm.

In a less severe form, with imbecility, disturbances in mental and physical development are quite clearly observed. Imbeciles master the elements of speech, but their vocabulary is small and their pronunciation is incorrect.

Moronic children, who make up the bulk of students in auxiliary schools, have a much milder degree of mental underdevelopment and minor deviations in physical development. Children with this intellectual disability can speak, and their motor impairments are so compensated that they do not interfere with their future involvement in work. The peculiarity of morons is manifested in the underdevelopment of thinking, but it is expressed to a lesser extent in them than in imbeciles.

In a child with an intellectual disability, by the time he or she enters school by the age of seven, the practice of verbal communication takes a short period of time - about 3-4 years. All these years, the rate of development of his speech has been slow, and his speech activity is insufficient. The child turns out to have underdeveloped spoken and everyday speech, which makes it difficult for him to communicate with adults. The child rarely takes part in conversations; he answers questions asked in monosyllables and often incorrectly.

When explaining the reasons that cause delayed speech development in children with intellectual disabilities, it should be understood that, first of all, they are characterized by a general underdevelopment of the entire psyche as a whole, leading to significant changes and delays in mental development [3].

The speech of children with intellectual disabilities is often monotonous, inexpressive, devoid of complex and subtle emotional nuances, in some cases it is slow, in others it is accelerated.

Children with intellectual disabilities have a poor vocabulary, inaccurate use of words, difficulties in updating the dictionary, the passive vocabulary predominates over the active one, and the process of organizing semantic fields is disrupted. Children with intellectual disabilities do not know the names of many objects, parts of objects; their vocabulary is dominated by nouns with specific meanings, there are no words of a general nature, few adjectives, adverbs, and substitutions of words based on semantic similarity are observed.

The passive vocabulary is much wider than the active one, but it is difficult to update; to activate it you need to ask a leading question; many words never become concepts [4].

Already in the first year of life in a child with an intellectual disability, there is an absence or later appearance of babbling. This occurs due to underdevelopment of phonemic hearing, which is a consequence of an anomaly in the general development of children with intellectual disabilities.

Let us consider the features of speech development in children with intellectual disabilities in more detail.

Among children with intellectual disabilities, 40-60% of violations of the phonetic aspect of speech are observed.

In such children, as in normal children, articulatory-complex sounds are more often disturbed - these are whistling, hissing, [r] and [l]. Along with the distorted pronunciation of sounds, a large number are noted. Replacements are often variable, i.e. A child with an intellectual disability can pronounce the same sound correctly in one case, but distort it or miss it completely in another [4].

Children with Down syndrome have a slow rate of speech and sometimes scanned speech. Voice disorders are also often observed in children with intellectual disabilities.

The immaturity of the grammatical aspect of speech in children with disorders is manifested in agrammatism, distortion of the use of cases, confusion of prepositions, and incorrect agreement of nouns with adjectives and numerals.

Children's statements are characterized by simple and uncommon sentences, with the main members omitted. Increasing the length of a sentence occurs by listing events and combining sentences using conjunctions and intonation.

Also, children with intellectual disabilities exhibit impairments in dialogic and monologue speech. Children have difficulty starting a conversation, may react inadequately to spoken remarks, do not switch from the position of a listener to the position of a speaker, and are not interested in receiving new information [5].

During monologue speech in children with intellectual disabilities, distortion of the logic and sequence of statements, fragmentation, slippage from the topic, which leads to the formation of side associations, poverty and stereotyped lexical structure, and the presence of features that are inherent in situational speech can be observed [6].

Thus, difficulties in a child’s speech development are directly related to intellectual impairments in the use of speech as a verbal function and a regulator of behavior.

This is explained by the fact that children with intellectual development disorders are not always able to complete speech tasks, especially if they have several tasks. For this category of children, activities generally become complex and are controlled by their verbal generalizations.

Summarizing the above about the uniqueness of the speech development of children with intellectual disabilities, we summarize that a number of researchers (A.K. Aksenova, V.I. Lubovsky, V.G. Petrova and others) identify a number of specific deviations and anomalies of speech ontogenesis that are characteristic of this group of children.

Scientists have demonstrated a discrepancy with the norm of speech development in a child with an intellectual disability already in the first year of life (absence of babbling, humming, etc.) and the impossibility of overcoming the signs of speech pathology until he reaches school age. Speech development in children of this category is delayed and is characterized by a number of deviations that manifest themselves in the phonetic, lexical, syntactic and grammatical aspects of speech.