Language Ability in People With Intellectual Disability

Abstract

It is necessary for children to develop skills for language expression so that they can easily master the curriculum, but also in order to communicate with the environment, to express their attitudes and needs. Children with intellectual disability (ID) are characterized by many changes in developmental abilities, one of those changes is the different language development. The purpose of this paper is to show how intellectual deficit affect language development, i.e. the possibility of forming concepts, and the relationship of this ability with gender and age of the respondents. For the needs of our research, we used the AKADIA test (Atkinson, Johnston and Lindsaz, 1972) - a test for assessing the person's development abilities. We used one of the subtests for assessing the possibility of forming concepts and we adapted it in Macedonian language. We included a sample of 144 students (64 students with ID and 80 students with typical development). Regarding the obtained results, we can conclude that the intellectual deficit negatively affects the possibility of forming concepts, i.e. it makes language development more difficult.