Effect of motoric improvement on language progress in brain damaged children

Abstract EN

Brain damaged children whether in the diffuse or the localized forms are accompanied by motoric and language delays.

The motoric delay is one of the factors that add to the burden of linguistic delay because the motor handicap prevents those children from acquiring many perceptual experiences that normally prepare any child for language acquisition.

This study was conducted on thirty-eight brain-damaged children who used to attend both the Physical & Language Rehabilitation sessions in the Phoniatry Unit at Ain Shams University Hospitals.

The aim was to find out the effect of improvement in the motoric abilities, as well as other possible factors, on language promotion in those children.

The results denoted that improvement in motoric abilities was the major factor to affect language progress (p < 0.01).

The second factor to affect language progress was found to be the duration of therapy (p < 0.05).

Improvement in language was found to positively correlate with improvement in motoric age, reflexive age, manual age, mental age, social age and duration of therapy (r = 0.83, 0.61, 0.71, 0.70, 0.48, and 0.56 respectively).

This highlights the importance of the team approach of physical and communicative therapy of brain damaged children.