Language Impairments and What They Do to Our Clients - Michele LaVigne -

Language Impairments and What They Do to Our Clients - Michele LaVigne

For over eighty years, social scientists have known that poor language skills are closely associated with the constellation of emotional and behavioral disturbances routinely seen in in our clients. These include conduct disorder, academic deficits, social incompetence, impulsivity, and even aggression. As we might expect, researchers have also found that language impairments are present at a high rate within juvenile and adult correctional institutions. This webinar examines the behavioral, communicative, and legal implications of widespread language deficits among our clients, and more importantly, what we can do about it.
I found out about language impairments almost by accident. I was talking with staff at Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Madison, Wisconsin and they happened to mention that the adolescents they worked with (ages 13-19, adjudicated delinquent and committed to juvenile corrections) had expressive and receptive language skills that ranged from a high of “below average” all the way down the first percentile – with about a quarter of the kids scoring in this rock bottom range.   Which led me to ask, “what’s up with that?”
Because I work at a law school I have had the luxury of rooting around in extensive databases and figuring out what’s up with that. And what’s up with that is startling. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Language impairment –a failure to fully develop competency in language and language use-- is notably prevalent among the populations public defenders routinely represent: individuals with ADHD and/or learning disabilities, people who had been labeled “behavior problems” in school, victims of abuse and neglect, and those raised in extreme poverty.
• Underdeveloped language ability can have life-long effects not only on communication, but behavior, learning, knowledge, emotional development, mental health, self-control, and social skills.
• An individual with a language impairment is twice as likely to be arrested as one without.
• Within correctional institutions (both adult and juvenile) language impairments occur at rates four to seven times that of the non-incarcerated population.

The legal implications of language impairments are painfully obvious, from competency to stand trial, to Miranda, to ability to tell one’s own story, to ability to comply with rules of supervision. Which led me to ask another question: “why don’t we in the legal system know about this?” Ultimately I ended up writing two articles (the law school thing again) that placed language impairment research in the context of our clients’ painful journeys through the criminal and juvenile justice systems.