An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.1 Language impairment
Language impairment means the absence of some part of the language faculty: we
say ‘part’ advisedly since the absence of the whole of the language faculty is probably
found only in completely vegetative states. Impairment can occur at any age: the
child may be born lacking some physical or mental attribute which prevents or slows
the development of so-called normal language. At any age an individual may suffer
loss of control of part of the language faculty through illness or accident. And some
losses which occur throughout life following trauma of some kind occur regularly
(though not universally) among the elderly, brought on by the normal process of
ageing, which after all can be regarded as a form of trauma.
4.2 Kinds of impairment
Among young children the common impairments concern physical disabilities such
as cleft palate, emotional states which cause stammering, and mental retardations
which slow down normal speech acquisition. There are also special conditions such
as dyslexia and dysarthria, which may or may not be altered states of consciousness,
but clearly, whatever their cause, require intervention and treatment. Then there are
the large-scale physical disabilities of the young (though also acquired, again through
illness, in later life), disabilities such as blindness and deafness. Accidents (industrial,
traffic and so on) and illness (e.g. stroke) bring about particular physical impairments
in parts of the brain and so cause various types of aphasia. These aphasias may (but
need not) affect whole language repertoires among bilinguals and multilinguals, in
the sense that if, for example, speaking (or one component of speaking) is lost, then
it is lost in every language of the repertoire. What the elderly – usually the very
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elderly – may experience is loss through gradual attrition of the components of their
language repertoire. Thus, they may lose the ability to nominate and to recall proper
names. Such loss again typically affects the whole repertoire of bi- and multilinguals.
But a further humiliation of the bilingual old is that they commonly regress to an
earlier state so that later acquired languages among adult migrants, for example, are
lost and only the language used in childhood remains. In all such cases what we
observe is the application of the rule of Ribot: first in, last out.