Speech impairment as a means of thinking is an important diagnostic criterion in the clinical picture. Often, psychopathological processes manifest themselves in a speech before the disorders manifest themselves in the cognitive sphere. Studying speech through language (language competence) is essential for understanding the mechanisms and dynamics of mental disorders in various mental health conditions.
A relevant issue is that of adolescence. The issue becomes important in the study of organic personality disorders, as well as emotional and behavioral disorders. The clinical picture of these abnormalities may not be evident in thinking.
This requires careful attention to the formation of speech functions and language, which can contribute to the description of the state of thinking in these children.
There is very little research into speech and language skills in adolescents with personality and behavioral disorders. In studying the peculiarities of spontaneous speech in adolescents with organic personality disorder (hereinafter - ORL) it was found that their speech is characterized by low vocabulary, poverty, elements of grammar, perseverance, reduced speech activity, reduced ability to understand logical and grammatical relations. In children with ORL of oligophrenic type, there is a significant decrease in the volume of vocabulary and speech acts in general. In turn, impulsivity and spontaneity were revealed in the speech of teenagers with psychopathic ORL.
The study of pathopsychological peculiarities in adolescents with a socialized disorder of inorganic behavior showed that it is more difficult for them to apply the knowledge of morphological peculiarities of the language they have significantly decreased grammatical sensitivity, difficulties in the allocation of speech parts and application of syntax knowledge were found. Study the peculiarities of language competence in adolescents with mental disorders (personality and behavioral disorders associated with organic brain lesions or developmental disorders).
The following methods are used:
- a grammatical sensitivity test in which words that are suitable for the purpose of missing are inserted into the text;
- a dialogue test that encourages the child to operate on complex syntactic structures in communicating situations;
- a sample of reproductive dialogue speech, in which the simple syntax of the text should encourage the subject to build complex syntactic constructions;
- a test for productive narrative speech, which tests the degree of syntactic complexity of statements, the transmission of the meaning of the text, the relations of the subjects of the situation
The method formed grammatical structure of speech were carried out, word sentences were composed, sentences were repeated, sentences were verified, prepositions were added to sentences, sentences were completed. Descriptive statistics were calculated. Inter-group comparisons were made using the Mann-Whitney Criterion, and Spearman's correlation analysis between sample indicators. The results are discussed here at the significance level p<0.05 (in some cases, - p<0.1).
7 children, 12-14 years old, who are under treatment in the Sukhareva MCPP NPC. According to, four children were diagnosed with F07.88 (Other Organic Personal and Behavioural Disorders due to Mixed Diseases), two with F91.2 (Socialized Behavioural Disorder), and one with F98.8 (Other Clarified Emotional Disorders and Behavioural Disorders Starting in Childhood and Adolescence).
Discussion
The most interesting results are given. Significant interindividual differences have been revealed in the evaluation of the implementation of almost all methods, which corresponds to the data on the control group. The variability of estimates in the group with pathologies is much lower than in the control group (the range of values differs by 1.5-3.5 times).
Children with ARLs were found to be more exhausted than other subjects. This was manifested in the primary refusal to perform the methods, a small percentage of completed tasks (for example, the number of translated words in quasi-texts), which had an impact on the small interindividual variability in terms of methods compared to the results of children with other pathologies. Similar when studying the peculiarities of language competence in children of secondary school age with a diagnosis of minimum brain dysfunction.