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CLINICAL LINGUISTICS Kinds of impairment

المؤلف:  Alan Davies

المصدر:  An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

الجزء والصفحة:  P55-C2

2026-07-22

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CLINICAL LINGUISTICS

Kinds of impairment

Among young children the common impairments concern physical disabilities such as cleft palate, emotional states which cause stammering, and mental retardations which slow down normal speech acquisition. There are also special conditions such as dyslexia and dysarthria, which may or may not be altered states of consciousness, but clearly, whatever their cause, require intervention and treatment. Then there are the large-scale physical disabilities of the young (though also acquired, again through illness, in later life), disabilities such as blindness and deafness. Accidents (industrial, traffic and so on) and illness (e.g. stroke) bring about particular physical impairments in parts of the brain and so cause various types of aphasia. These aphasias may (but need not) affect whole language repertoires among bilinguals and multilinguals, in the sense that if, for example, speaking (or one component of speaking) is lost, then it is lost in every language of the repertoire. What the elderly – usually the very elderly – may experience is loss through gradual attrition of the components of their language repertoire. Thus, they may lose the ability to nominate and to recall proper names. Such loss again typically affects the whole repertoire of bi- and multilinguals. But a further humiliation of the bilingual old is that they commonly regress to an earlier state so that later acquired languages among adult migrants, for example, are lost and only the language used in childhood remains. In all such cases what we observe is the application of the rule of Ribot: first in, last out.