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Nada SIKIC,

Jelena IVICEVIC-DESNICA

APHASIA-EPILEPSY

SINDROME LANDAU-KLEFFNER

            In the few past years the expert team in our institution identified five children with specific disorders in speech development caused by difficulties in understanding of speech.

            All children had normal psychophysical development up to three to four years of life, when speech disorders, very often entirely nonspecific, started. In some children the changes had been preceded by epileptic attacks either in vigilance or in sleep.

            Gradually speech expression lags behind, speech stops to be meaningful, it is not the result of child’s creativity but a series of learned schemes, sometimes related to current situation, so that in this period the environment very often does not detect the problem.

            Progressively behavior disturbance takes place as a result of incomprehension of verbal demands put upon a child. Parents usually start to suspect hearing impairment and this is the main reason for coming to our institution. Additional diagnostics confirmed the existence of non-specific disorder related to syndrome epilepsy-aphasia, whereupon medical treatment and rehabilitation started.