A Study of Language Disabilities in Cerebral Palsied Children

Abstract

Sixty-eight spastic, 24 athetoid, and 32 normal children were administered the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities to determine whether this instrument would distinguish among the groups. Non-language variables, such as age, cognitive ability, and social experience were controlled, and the data were subjected to factor analysis, analysis of variance, and discriminant analysis. Significant differences were found, favoring the spastic group on ITPA tests at the automatic-sequential level of language and the athetoid group on ITPA tests at the representational level. The scores for the normal group were uniformly higher than the scores of the cerebral palsied groups and separated the normal group from the other two groups.