Therapy Manual for Treating Syntactic Errors in Tamil Speaking Children with Language Disorders

Abstract

The aim of this study was to develop a manual for enhancing the ability of linguistically delayed or deviant children to comprehend and express the sentence structures appropriate to the age. The method of this study included three phases. The first phase included development of manual incorporating different Tamil markers and pictures for them. The markers were pronouns, adjectives, tenses, adverbs, case markers and postpositions. Second phase included a pilot study with the manual in which thirty school going Tamil speaking children in the age range of 2.6 years to 5.6 years served as subjects. Third phase included incorporating modifications or corrections of the stimuli (pictures) following the pilot study. The pilot study was carried out under four different tasks viz choosing the correct answer, judgment, description and imitation task. The results showed that there was growth and development across the three age groups for the selected grammatical markers. But the performance was also found varying between the tasks across different age groups.