Evaluation of Conversational Skills in Children with Intellectual Disability and Their Mothers’ Parenting Styles

Non-specific intellectual disability (ID) with a prevalence of approximately 1% is relativelycommonand has profound negative effects on language development. However, it has received little research attention, especially regarding conversational skills. Developing methods to detect, assess, and categorize conversational skills has created major challenges for speech-language pathologists due to their importance as part of adaptive behaviors in children with ID.

The present study aimed to examine pragmatic skills through a socio-conversational model, as well as to define the parenting styles of their mothers accordingly.

A total of 21 children with ID enrolled in preschool-grade 2 were included in this study. A comprehensive set of language assessment tools, including the Test of Language Development-Persian: 3 (TOLD-P):3, Conversational Rating Scale, Vineland Social Growth Scale, and Socio-Conversational Analysis of interaction between child-mother was administered. The descriptive indices, including mean, standard deviation (SD), and percentiles were computed using SPSS-24. The Spearman-rho was applied to search for possible correlation between conversational skills and general language indices.

The Means for non-verbal age (based on Leiter test) and chronological age were 4.43 and 7.98 years, respectively. According to the composite scores of the TOLD-P:3, children with ID scored below 69, except for semantics. Their language age for eight subscales of the TOLD-P:3 was 3:04, but it was 5:38 for word articulation. The mean ± SD for different variables were: MLU = 1.95 ± 0.88, TTR = 0.64 ± 0.16, the number of total sentences = 14.52 ± 13.35, and the percentage of complex sentences = 19.71 ± 39.94. Over 60 percentages of the participants scored below average in social growth scale. All children scored as “no or infrequent pragmatic skills” or “pragmatic skills are emerging” in the Conversational Rating Scale. Two-thirds of the mothers had “authoritarian” parenting style.

A remarkable delay in language skills, especially in conversational skills of children with non-specific ID, was found and highlighted. The most common parenting style was detected to be controlling style; due to the limitations of our study, however, no definite conclusion was drawn concerning the causal relationship between parenting style and children’s language delays. Children with ID played different roles during interaction, but most of them were inclined to be “passive conversationalist”.