Dohmen, A; (2007) Investigating sociocognitive skills in 2 and 3 year old German-speaking children with typical and delayed language development. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

It has been estimated that 7% of children have language impairments. The early identification of these problems has been recognised as very important to prevent consequential social, behaviour and educational problems. By the point when children start to acquire words, some of their sociocognitive skills are already quite elaborated and others' arc developing rapidly. During the last decades the relationship between several sociocognitive skills and language has been examined in depth in the areas of typical child development as well as in children with autism. It has been found that these interpersonal skills are strongly associated with early language and communication abilities and further predict later language skills in typically developing children as well as children with autism. More recently, children's knowledge of other person's motivational and intentional states has become a focus of interest and has been predicted to be crucial for the acquisition of communication and language. This knowledge is inseparably connected with the acquisition of sociocognitivc skills. However, the relation between sociocognitive skills and specific deficits in language has been less extensively explored, but Chiat and Roy currently have begun to look at early processing skills that are known to underpin language development as predictors of later language disorders. Grown out of their research with English-speaking children, this project primarily aimed to investigate whether, and to what extent, performance on assessments which tap a range of interrelated sociocognitive skills differ between groups of 2 and 3 year old German- speaking children with typical and delayed language development. Furthermore, two novel assessments were specifically designed for this project to additionally investigate children's imitation skills. It was found that the groups of language delayed children clearly showed deficits in all sociocognitive skills in comparison to the groups of typically developing children, though further analyses revealed overlaps between the performance of some individual cases of clinical children with the performance of the control children. In addition, mismatchs between sociocognitivc abilities and specific linguistic abilities were observed in the individual profiles of some language delayed children. These findings are discussed in terms of possible impacts of the discovered sociocognitive deficits on the acquisition of language and communication, focussing on the role of imitation for the onset of children's vocabulary- spurt.

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