Panorama of the Non-Verbal Cognitive Abilities Among Children with SLI

Background: SLI is a disorder with many questionable abilities and marked heterogeneity regarding many aspects. Many determinants could predict the drawback of the disorder on academic, social and vocational levels of the affected children. The full-blown picture of the disorder was and still is an area of interest. It seems urgent to make a revision of the disorder (regarding its definition, diagnostic criteria and classification). One of the questionable aspects of the disorder is the nonverbal cognitive abilities among the affected children. Aim: The current work is aiming to explore the non- verbal cognitive abilities among different types of SLI children in order to draw an overview of the nature of cognitive affection among this population. Patients and Methods: A cross sectional study carried on a random sample of 39 Egyptian children previously diagnosed as SLI (30 males and 9 females) their ages ranged from 2y 8 m to 8y. The participating children were subjected to an assessment protocol that included assessment of the language aptitude (by modified PLS-4 Arabic edition) and the nonverbal cognitive abilities (by Stanford Binet 5th edition). Results: Showed that the syntactic phonological and the semantics pragmatics sub-types of SLI exhibited a varying degree of affection of the non-verbal cognitive abilities. Conclusion: Different types of SLI showed a marked variability in their non-verbal cognitive profile. SLI could be classified into SLI-expressive type with unaffected cognitive abilities (both verbal and non-verbal) and SLI-receptive type which need deeper inspection of their non-vernal cognitive abilities.