The importance of early estimate of speech-language capacities in prevention of developmental dysgraphia

Abstract

Written speech is the last to develop and it represents a form of speech expression. It consists of two speech fields. These are coding and performing of a written speech act and decoding of written signs. The first field belongs to performance of willing acts and it belongs to experiential activities while decoding belongs to Gnostic functions. In the process of writing a phoneme is connected with a certain letter image. It is considered that the most common cause of substitution is the impossibility of adequate auditive voice discrimination. Subtle voice differentiation is more necessary for proper writing than for oral speech, which means that there is no writing without proper speech and language development. Dysgraphia is a disability in learning to write or in the process of acquiring the ability to write although there are preserved intelligence, good sight and hearing, proper education and social conditions. Early detection of faults in development of motor and speech patterns and timely involvement of children in appropriate treatments would give a significant results and contribute to a significant reduction in number of children having a dysgraphia. Our research was conducted on the population of young schoolchildren and included the sample of 482 children. The aim of the research was to study speech-language capacities and graphomotor abilities in order to detect writing difficulties among young schoolchildren in Belgrade schools. Based on the results obtained from the research and their statistic analysis, we can conclude that the existing capacities of speech and language pathology offer possibilities to detect difficulties in writing at young schoolchildren.