Language Fix

Mental Retardation

- distractibility and a short attention span
- semantic difficulties, with small, more concrete vocabularies
- comprehension superior to expression
- poor morphology
- telegraphic speech
- passive interaction, or physically aggressive interaction
- delays across multiple domains

Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

- comprehension problems, especially of sentences
- word-retrieval problems leading to reduced fluency
- syntactic problems, including limited MLU, fewer utterances, and difficulty expressing and understanding long, complex sentences
- reading and writing problems; poor academic performance
- pragmatic problems such as difficulty with turn taking and topic maintenance (often related to poor inhibition and lack of self-monitoring)
- difficulty with attention and focus
- memory problems
- inability to recognize one’s own difficulties
- reduced speed of information processing
- difficulties with reasoning and organization

(from An Advanced Review of Speech-Language Pathology, Celeste Roseberry-McKibben and M.N. Hedge; ProEd; 2000.)