Comorbidity of motor and language impairments in preschool children of Taiwan.
Poor fine-motor skill in five-year-olds is a cheap, fast warning light for hidden speech or language delays.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Cheng et al. (2009) screened every five- and six-year-old in 18 Taipei public kindergartens. They gave each child a short motor test and a short language test. Teachers helped collect the data during regular school hours.
The team wanted to know how many preschoolers have both movement and speech problems at the same time.
What they found
About two in every hundred children showed both developmental coordination disorder and speech/language delay. Kids who scored low on manual dexterity almost always scored low on language too.
The link was strong even after the researchers checked age and sex. Poor fine-motor skill was the clearest warning sign for later language trouble.
How this fits with other research
Asonitou et al. (2012) ran a near-copy study three years later and saw the same pattern. Their data confirm that Taiwanese preschoolers with shaky motor skills also lag in language.
Capio et al. (2013) widened the lens to older kids. They showed the worse the motor score, the steeper the pile-up of reading, attention, and daily-living problems. This extends the preschool warning into grade school.
Green et al. (1987) saw the flip side decades earlier. Half of children in a speech clinic had a psychiatric disorder. Together these papers trace one line: motor red flags predict language risk, and language red flags predict wider mental-health risk.
Why it matters
If a child struggles with buttons, beads, or scissors, add a quick language probe. The motor score gives you a free heads-up on possible speech delay. Catch both early and you can start OT and speech together instead of waiting.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Comorbidity of motor and speech/language impairments was investigated in 363 preschool children between the ages of 5 and 6 years (boys: 205, age 6.04+/-0.48 years; girls: 158, age 5.98+/-0.53 years). The children were sampled from two municipals of Taiwan, and were determined to present no apparent neurological, musculoskeletal, cardiopulmonary system impairment or mental insufficiency. They were administered with three speech/language tests and a motor test (Movement Assessment Battery for Children, or M-ABC). The results showed a significant correlation between the total score of the motor test and the total score of each of the speech and language tests. Regression analysis that controlled for IQ (C-TONI) further showed that manual dexterity, but not ball skills or balance, of M-ABC was predictive of all scores on the speech and language tests. To determine a deficit on a test, a score at or below the 10th percentile of the norm or a score at or below 1.25SD from the group mean was established as the cutoff. For the speech/language impairment, a deficit on at least two out of the three tests also applied. Following these criteria, 22 children (6.1%) were identified to have Developmental Speech and Language Disorder (DSLD), and 45 (12.4%) to have Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD). Comorbid DSLD and DCD were found in six children (1.65%). Chi-square analysis revealed a significant correlation between DSLD and DCD (p<.03). The odds of DSLD was higher (by about three-fold) among the children with DCD than among the children without (0.15 vs. 0.05). Comorbid motor and speech/language impairments in preschool children appear to be a significant clinical condition that requires the attention of the therapeutic community. Manual dexterity, in particular, seems to be an important clue for understanding the shared mechanism of motor and speech/language impairments.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2009 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2009.02.008