Subtypes of severe speech and language impairments: psychometric evidence from four-year-old children in the Netherlands

Abstract

Most, if not all, of the studies of subtypes of children with language impairments have been conducted with English-speaking children. The possibility and validity of identified subtypes for non-English clinical populations are, as yet, unknown. This study was designed to provide cross-linguistic evidence of language subtypes. A broad battery of tests was administered to measure the phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic, discourse, and pragmatic abilities of a representative sample of 110 4-year-old Dutch children who had been previously diagnosed as severely speech and language impaired. Principal components analyses revealed 4 subtypes of speech and language impairments, which were labeled lexical-semantic, speech production, syntactic-sequential, and auditory perception. These results were consistent with recent theoretical claims about the classification of English-speaking children with speech and language impairments.