The peculiarities of mental development are most clearly manifested in children with deafness or severe hearing loss.
The mental development of children with hearing impairment indicates how important hearing is in the development of speech, in the formation of all cognitive processes, in the development of the emotional-sensory sphere and personal characteristics of the child. The peculiarities of mental development are most clearly manifested in children with deafness or severe hearing loss.
Deaf psychology - a section of special psychology
Deaf psychology studies the characteristics of the psychophysical development of children with hearing impairment. The main task of this branch of psychology is to discover compensatory opportunities through which one can overcome hearing impairments, obtain sufficient education and ensure participation in work.
Deaf psychologists note the following developmental features of children with hearing impairment:
- lag in psychophysical development from hearing peers, on average, by 1-3 years;
- low physical activity;
- the speed of performing individual movements and the pace of motor activity in general are slowed down;
- coordination of movements and orientation in space are impaired;
- difficulties in switching attention;
- memorization is based on visual images;
- the process of assimilation of information is slow;
- difficulties in communicating with peers and other people.
Difficulties in establishing contacts and peculiar relationships with ordinary children can lead to the formation of such negative traits as isolation and aggressiveness.
The peculiarities of the mental development of children with hearing impairment also lie in the fact that complete or partial deafness deprives such children of an important source of information and thereby limits the process of intellectual development. Since the personal and behavioral characteristics of children with impaired hearing are not determined biologically, with timely provision of correctional assistance and the creation of appropriate conditions, any deviations in personality development can be overcome.
Corrective assistance for children with hearing impairment
The most widespread form of providing correctional assistance for hearing loss in children is their education in special kindergartens and schools, as well as in special classes or groups at general educational institutions. They carry out targeted work on training and education of children with hearing impairments, starting from 1.5-2 years. Psychological and pedagogical influence is aimed both at the general development of the child, his motor, intellectual and emotional-volitional spheres, and at the development of speech and thinking.
Today, almost all children with hearing impairment have the opportunity to choose - to study in specialized correctional educational institutions or to receive an inclusive education and integrate into an environment with hearing peers. In any case, communication of a hearing-impaired child occurs in the process of collective educational and practical activities, with skillful guidance from adults, providing the child with the opportunity to become more and more independent.
Communication and joint activities for a child with impaired hearing are important conditions for normal mental development, familiarization with the norms of life in society, broadening his horizons and knowledge of relationships between people.
Features of the development of mental processes in children with speech disorders
Maria Oshmarina
Features of the development of mental processes in children with speech disorders
Objective: to introduce teachers to the features of the development of mental processes in children with speech disorders .
Sensations and perception.
Impaired phonemic perception is observed in all children with speech disorders , and there is an undoubted connection between the speech-auditory and speech-motor analyzers. G. F. Sergeeva notes that dysfunction of the speech motor analyzer in dysarthria and rhinolalia greatly affects the auditory perception of phonemes. At the same time, there is not always a direct relationship between a violation of the pronunciation of sounds and a violation of their perception . Thus, in a number of cases, there is a hearing differentiation of those phonemes that are not contrasted in pronunciation, while in other cases, those phonemes that are differentiated in pronunciation are not distinguished. Nevertheless, a certain proportionality is observed here: the greater the number of sounds differentiated in pronunciation, the more successful the differentiation of phonemes by ear is. And the fewer “supports”
in pronunciation, the worse the conditions for the formation of phonemic images.
The development of phonemic hearing itself is in direct connection with the development of all aspects of speech , which, in turn, is determined by the general development of the child .
The study of visual perception allows us to draw conclusions that in preschool children with speech pathology, this mental function lags behind the norm in its development and is characterized by insufficient formation of a holistic image of an object. Research shows that simple visual recognition of real objects and their images does not differ from the norm in these children . Difficulties are observed when tasks become more complex (recognition of objects in conditions of overlap, noise)
.
Thus, children with general speech underdevelopment perceive the image of an object in complicated conditions with certain difficulties: the decision-making time increases, children are not confident in the correctness of their answers, and identification errors are noted.
The number of errors increases as the number of informative features of objects decreases. In the implementation of the task of perceptual action (equating to the standard)
Children in this category more often use elementary forms of orientation, i.e., trying on a standard, in contrast to
children with normal speech , who predominantly use visual correlation. Children with speech underdevelopment often, when equating figures, are guided not by their shape, but by their color.
Moreover, boys often have lower results than girls. A.P. Voronova, in a study of preschoolers with general speech underdevelopment, notes that children in this category in most cases have a low level of development of letter gnosis : they have difficulty differentiating between normal and mirror writing of letters, do not recognize letters superimposed on each other, they have difficulties in naming and comparing letters that are graphically similar, and even in naming letters of a printed cipher given in disorder. In this regard, many children are not ready to master writing.
When studying the peculiarities of spatial orientation of children with speech underdevelopment , it turned out that children generally find it difficult to differentiate the concepts of “right”
and
“to the left”
, indicating the location of the object, and difficulties in orienting in one’s own body are also observed,
especially when tasks become more complex.
For preschool children disorder visual perception and visual object images and, to a lesser extent, visual working memory, which is grossly impaired in children with intellectual disabilities, although these children suffer less from visual perception.
Attention.
The attention of children with speech underdevelopment is characterized by a number of features : instability, lower levels of voluntary attention, and difficulties in planning their actions. Children have difficulty concentrating on analyzing conditions and searching for different ways and means to solve problems.
speech pathology find it much more difficult to concentrate on completing a task under verbal instructions than under visual instructions. In the first case, there is a greater number of errors associated with the violation of rough differentiation by color, shape, and arrangement of figures.
The pace of activity decreases during work .
Distributing attention between speech and practical action turns out to be a difficult, almost impossible task. Errors of attention are present throughout the entire work and are not always noticed and corrected independently. The nature of errors and their distribution over time are qualitatively different from the norm.
All types of activity control (proactive, current and subsequent)
are often unformed or significantly
impaired , and the most affected are the proactive ones, associated with the analysis of task conditions, and the current ones (in
the process of completing the task ) .
Subsequent control (according to the result, its individual elements are manifested mainly with additional help from the teacher: repetition of instructions, showing a sample, specific instructions, etc. are required. Features of voluntary attention in children with speech underdevelopment are clearly manifested in the nature of distractions. So, if for children with the norm of speech development in the process of activity, there is a tendency to be distracted “at the experimenter”
(they look at the teacher, try to determine by his reaction whether they are performing the task correctly or not, then for
children with speech pathology the predominant types of distraction are the following: “looked out the window ( on the sides)
",
"carries out actions not related to the completion of the task
." A low level of voluntary attention in
children with severe speech impairments leads to an unformed or significantly impaired structure of their activity.
Memory.
Memory studies allow us to conclude that in this category of children the volume of visual memory is practically no different from the norm, auditory memory and memorization productivity are noticeably reduced compared to normally speaking children. Children often forget complex instructions (three-, four-step), omit some of their elements and change the sequence of the proposed tasks. Children, as a rule, do not resort to verbal communication in order to clarify the instructions.
Violation of the structure of activity, inaccurate and fragmentary perception of instructions are associated not only with a decrease in auditory memory, but also with attentional characteristics .
However, despite the existing difficulties, children in this category remain relatively intact in their ability to remember semantically and logically.
Thinking and imagination.
In children with speech underdevelopment, the process and results of thinking are affected by deficiencies in knowledge and, most often, violations of self-organization . They have insufficient information about the environment, about the properties and functions of objects of reality, and difficulties arise in establishing cause-and-effect relationships between phenomena. Violations of self-organization are caused by deficiencies in the emotional-volitional and motivational spheres and manifest themselves in psychophysical disinhibition , less often in inhibition and lack of sustainable interest in the task. Children often do not engage in the problem situation proposed to them for a long time or, on the contrary, very quickly begin to complete tasks, but at the same time evaluate the problem situation superficially, without taking into account all the features of the task . Others begin tasks but quickly lose interest, do not complete them, and refuse to work, even when completing tasks correctly. At the same time, the ability to correctly carry out mental operations in children with speech underdevelopment is, as a rule, preserved.
Having fully mastered the prerequisites for the development of mental operations available to their age, children, however, lag behind in the development of visual and figurative thinking, without special training they have difficulty mastering analysis, synthesis, comparison, classification, exclusion of unnecessary concepts and inference by analogy.
Children with speech impairments lag behind their normally developing peers . Such children are characterized by the use of cliches, monotony, they require much more time to engage in work, in the process there is a significant increase in the duration of pauses, and exhaustion of activity is observed.
In general, children with speech underdevelopment are characterized by : insufficient mobility, inertia, rapid exhaustion of imagination processes , and a lower level of spatial manipulation of images.
The speech underdevelopment that children have (poor vocabulary, unformed phrasal speech , numerous agrammatisms, etc.), combined with a lag in the development children’s verbal creativity .
Speech and communication.
In general, the communicative capabilities of children with severe speech pathology are noticeably limited and in all respects significantly below the norm. Noteworthy is the low level of development of gaming activity: poor plot, procedural nature of the game , low speech activity. Most of these children are characterized by extreme excitability, and therefore, games not controlled by the teacher sometimes take on very unorganized forms. Often children in this category cannot occupy themselves with any activity at all, which indicates that their skills in joint activities are insufficiently developed. If children do some kind of general work on behalf of an adult, then each child strives to do everything in his own way, without focusing on his partner, without cooperating with him.
For the majority of older preschoolers with severe speech pathology, the situational and business form of communication predominates, which is typical for normally developing children 2–4 years of age.
In a small proportion of children with speech pathology, the non-situational – cognitive form of communication clearly predominates. They respond with interest to the teacher’s offer to read books, listen quite carefully to simple, entertaining texts, but after reading, it is quite difficult to organize a conversation with them: as a rule, children almost do not ask questions about the content, they cannot retell what they heard due to the immaturity of the reproductive phase of the monologue speech .
Almost half of the children have not developed a culture of communication: they are familiar with adults, they lack a sense of distance, their intonations are often loud and harsh, they are intrusive in their demands.
Thus, a complex speech and cognitive disorders in children with severe speech pathology prevents them from developing full-fledged communicative connections with others, complicates contacts with adults and can lead to their isolation in a group of peers. In this regard, special work is required to correct and develop all components of speech, cognitive and communicative activity in order to optimally and effectively adapt children with severe speech impairments to the conditions and demands of society.
LITERATURE
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2. Fundamentals of special psychology /edited by L. V. Kuznetsova Moscow 2003
3. Ulienkova U. V. children with mental
