Speech therapists 'need more respect'
Friday 3rd December 2010
Specific Language Impairment (SLI) has been ignored due to the prominence of other disorders, according to a developmental neuropsychology professor, who suggested speech therapists need to be given the respect they deserve to improve recognition of these conditions.
Dorothy Bishop, from the University of Oxford, writes in the Guardian that despite SLI being just as common as autism and dyslexia, the status of the profession most closely associated with it has led to a lack of research.
Bishop, who has written a paper in PloS One on the subject, says that speech and language therapists need more respect from others so that the SLI can gather the awareness it needs.
"My concern is that an essentially arbitrary compartmentalisation of conditions in relation to professional disciplines appears to have led to a gross inequality in how closely related conditions are perceived and investigated," she wrote in the paper.
Children with SLI have difficulty understanding and/or producing language, with no obvious cause, and the condition is thought to be as common as dyslexia and ten times as common as autism.
Written by Megan Smith
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