The Quality of Life of Young Adults With Histories of Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

When a child is diagnosed as having a language disorder, parents may ask the speech-language pathologist questions such as "How might this language disorder affect my child’s life?" Unfortunately, professionals have little empirical information upon which to base an answer to this question. The purpose of this paper is to provide information regarding reported quality of life (QOL) for a group of young adults with histories of mild to severe specific language impairment who had received language treatment. A QOL measurement tool was developed to gather information about personal happiness, life satisfaction, and status in various life domains (e.g,, education, occupation, family/social life). This QOL survey was used with 29 young adults with language impairments ( M = 21:6 years) and 29 controls ( M = 20:4 years). The results indicated no statistically significant differences between the two groups in the various subjective components of quality of life.