Journal of Special Education and Rehabilitation

28-39

Authors: Ljubica PRIBANIKJ, Marina MILKOIVKJ

Early diagnosis and intervention are now recognized as undeniable rights of deaf and hard-of-hearing children and their families. The deaf child’s family must have the opportunity to socialize with deaf children and deaf adults. The deaf child’s family must also have access to all the information on the general development of their child, and to special information on hearing impairment, communication options and linguistic development of the deaf child. The critical period hypothesis for language acquisition proposes that the outcome of language acquisition is not uniform over the lifespan but rather is best during early childhood. Individuals who learned sign language from birth performed better on linguistic and memory tasks than individuals who did not start learning sign language until after puberty. The old prejudice that the deaf child must learn the spoken language at a very young age, and that sign language can wait because it can be easily learned by any person at any age, cannot be maintained anymore. The cultural approach to deafness emphasizes three necessary components in the development of a deaf child: 1. stimulating early communication using natural sign language within the family and interacting with the Deaf community; 2. bilingual / bicultural education and 3. ensuring deaf persons’ rights to enjoy the services of high quality interpreters throughout their education from kindergarten to university. This new view of the phenomenology of deafness means that the environment needs to be changed in order to meet the deaf person’s needs, not the contrary.

52-65

Authors: Vesela MILANKOV, Aleksandra MIKOV

Speech and language development is a good indicator of child’s cognitive development. The risk factors influencing development and functioning of prematurely born children are multiple. In addition to articulation disorder, there are motoric, conginitive and social aspects of delayed development. Premature babies are born before they physically ready to leave the womb. However, most babies born after about 26 weeks of gestational age have chances for survival, but they are at a greater risk of medical complications, since the earlier children are born, the less developed their organs are. Aim: To demonstrate basic parameters, establish differences, determine characteristics of disorder of sound articulation in fullterm and preterm children. Methodology: Research was conducted at the Clinics of Child’s Habilitation and Rehabilitation in Novi Sad. The prospective research study was carried out comprising 61 children with mean age of 4 years. The study inclusion criteria were gestational age and birth weight. Regarding these parameters, the children without major neurlologic or system disabilities were included, and they were Serbian speaking. The sample comprised 31 children with GS≥38 weeks and body weight of ≥3000 g, while the preterm group comprised 30 children with GS≤32 weeks and body weight of ≤1500 g. Results of the study indicate to a difference between fullterm children and preterm children with regard to articulation disorders, of which the statistically significant was a sound distortion. The overall sample showed that the substitution with distortion was most frequent disorder, while the interdental sigmatism was the most represented one. Conclusion: The obtained results lead to conclusion that preterm children, being a high-risk group, need to be followed up by age two, and provided timely proffesional help at pre-school age, since numerous adverse factors affect their overall development.

89-101

Authors: Vesna KOSTIKJ-IVANOVIKJ

Educational process for children with mild intellectual disability in special primary schools in the Republic of Macedonia is realized by special Curriculum for students with difficulties in psychological development, prepared by the Bureau for Development of Education from the Ministry of Education and Science. These programs are developmental, and specially adapted to the abilities and capabilities of students with intellectual disabilities. The special educator observing the individual characteristics of his students should maximally respond to their specific needs and aspirations. The aim of the research was to determine the educational abilities of first-grade students with mild intellectual disability for following the teaching contents of the subjects Macedonian language, Math and Introduction to environment, provided by the Curriculum. Educational abilities of the examinees were especially weak in Math, while in the Introduction to environment they had average abilities and a little better ability they showed in the area of the Macedonian language. Regarding the variables gender and age, educational abilities of the examinees did not differ, while regarding the variable level of general abilities there were significant differences in their educational abilities. Special educators said that most of the examinees were completely or partially able to follow the Curriculum. Curriculum for the first grade students with intellectual disabilities generally corresponds to the educational abilities of these children.

110-121

Authors: Aneta T. HRISTOVA, Silvana FILIPOVA

Mental retardation is a very complex and specific society problem that appears in the earliest period of the child development. Speech represents one of the most important human qualities and undoubtedly a need for each individual, therefore, the logical conclusion is that it is essential for everyone, even for the mentally retarded individual as well. It is a fact that the speech deficit is one of the general and serious problems with mentally retarded children, which results in damaged, underdeveloped and late development of their speech. Therefore, these conditions also lower success in orthography level of handwriting. That is why we decided to use instruments which the special rehabilitation diagnostic offers, to evaluate the orthography level of handwriting of the mildly mentally retarded pupils in special primary schools, and to compare the obtained results with the success in Macedonian language, gender and the age of the pupil, in order to view their connection and continuance in their developing period. Many researches, as well as this one, have shown that the disorthography in a huge percentage is found in children with mild mental retardation. The results of the research have shown a low orthography level of the handwriting in children with mild mental retardation, which is dependant on the class-age, sex and the success in Macedonian language.

129-131

Authors: Ana POPOSKA

Getting closer to the articulation segment of SLI is important for diagnosis of children in early school age. Phonologic and articulation status of this population is specific, and acknowledging it, will secure adequate rehabilitation. The theory offers wide analysis of physiology of all speech-language aspects of the developmental period, as well as its pathology. The emphasis is put on the articulation segment in children with SLI. The goal of this study was to establish direct relation between speech-language development delay and the process of sound forming in children with SLI, and in the same time comparing it with the normal speech-language development. In this study a group of 35 children with SLI, and a group of 35 children without this problem were included. The examination was performed with four relevant tests: Global articulation test, Test for examining articulation, Articulation test for analytic estimation of phonologic and articulation disorders and Test for understanding speech. For processing data from empiric frequencies for specific categories in both tested groups, c2 test was used. In the same time, establishing correlation level between groups of different characteristics in examinees, quotient of contingency was included. Since the necessary confirmation of results correlation among different test results scored in both groups, Pearson test of correlation was also used. The results showed some important characteristics of phonologic-articulation disorders. Children suffering from SLI have approximately 20 well pronounced sounds. The biggest problem is pronunciation of sounds from fricative and affricate group, medial position of sound in a word, and the most frequent sound disorder is substitution. Detailed analysis resulted with dominant problem with the place of sound production, except in cases of sound mispronunciation of vowels and nasals. When estimating sound quality in word and sentence order, deviation of pronunciation for more than one degree occurred. This deviation happens as a result of bad hearing memory, bad hearing discrimination, bad phonology awareness and inelasticity of peripheral speaking organs. Interaction between articulation status and speech understanding is a direct consequence of the problem of sound successiveness in words. By the influence of oral dyspraxia, it is impossible a word well pronounced in isolated situation, to be well pronounced in word complex. As a conclusion, it should be stressed out that poor phoneme structure, phoneme capacity, as well as bad speech understanding in children with SLI have specifies and instability up to the level of terminal inadequacy, shown by pronunciation determined by instable and yet variable mechanisms, which do not obey to hierarchy built phoneme structure of a standard language. In fact, the guideline is to start phoneme correction, after achieving the stage of specific level in receptive speech, as well as expressive speech after achieving simple sentence construction.

135-138

Authors: Olivera RASHIKJ

At social community level there are still myths and stereotypes, which refer to sexuality of the persons with disabilities. The most common wrong assumptions are those stating that persons with disabilities are asexual – long life children and the opposite ideas which state that persons with disabilities are sexually impulsive. The truth is that sexuality is an integral part of each life starting in the childhood and stretching throughout the whole life. The main goal of this master thesis, presented on 190 sheets, was to elaborate the characteristics of sexual development of persons with disabilities, more exactly of persons with mental retardation, vision impairments, auditive impairments and persons with physical impairments. Furthermore, to determine the degree and manner of acquired sex education and to make comparison in terms of prevalence and reasons for sexual abuse of persons with different types and degrees of disabilities, as well as to stress the possibilities for prevention. The sample of the research was consisted of 317 examinees separated in 6 groups and one control group. The first group included 98 examinees with mental retardation, out of which 36 at the age between 10 and 15 years from the Special Primary Schools “Idnina” and “Dr. Zlatan Sremac”, 29 examinees with mild mental retardation older than 15 years from the State Secondary School for Rehabilitation and Education “St. Naum Ohridski”, 33 examinees with moderate mental retardation no older than 10 years of age, from Institution for Rehabilitation of the Children and Youth – Topansko Pole. The second group included 25 persons with visual impairments from the Institution for Rehabilitation of Children and Youth with Visual Impairments “Dimitar Vlahov”, out of which 8 were at the age between 10 and 15 years and 17 examinees were older than 15 years. The third group included 19 examinees with auditive impairments at the age between 10 and 15 years from the Institution for Rehabilitation of Children and Youth with Auditive Impairments “Kocho Racin” – Bitola and 16 examinees with auditive impairments older than 15 years from the Center for Education and Rehabilitation “Partenija Zografski” – Skopje. In the forth group there were 25 persons with physical impairment, from the Institution for Prevention and Rehabilitation of the Persons with Physical Impairments “Banja Bansko” – Strumica, 21 examinees no older than 12 years of age and 4 examinees from the Center for Cerebral Palsy at the age between 10 and 15 years. 72 special educators and rehabilitators and professional staff from the institutions, primary and secondary special schools were included in the fifth group, and in the sixth group were included 30 parents of the persons with disabilities. In the last group 32 pupils from the Primary School “Petar Zdravkovski – Penko” at the age between 10 and 15 years were included. In the third part of the master thesis the analysis of results and discussion were presented. The information presented in this part are nominal data, which after collecting, were numbered, grouped and tabled, and after that processed with standard statistical program SPSS 11 for WindowsXP, applying c2 test, which at the 2 x 2 tables was applied together with Fisher exact test R x C tables of contingency, in order to obtain more precise results and determine existence of the possible concession. In order to determinate correlation between two or more variables related to some of the questions, coefficient of contingency (C) was applied and for the questions where the examinees gave more than one answer, the test for evaluation of the equality of the percentage (z) was applied in order to estimate if the percentage of some answers was equal or different for two or more groups of examinees. Statistical important difference was at the level of p<0,05. As important we can point out the folowing conclusions: the persons with disabilities follow the same developmental cycle as other population with possible small concessions in relation with the type and degree of disability; all persons with disabilities are sexual creatures; they acquire information for sexual development from media or friends, and the knowledge about unwanted pregnancy and contracepcion is at lowest level. We determined that the most common method for presenting the contents of sexual development and education is the classical method with certain application of illustrations, while there is insufficient sexual education within the family. It was concluded that there was significant number of persons with disabilities which had been forced to watch different pornografic matherials or do different sexual actions. The most affected population in relation to this problem are persons with mental retardation, and the lowest education get persons with hearing impairments at the age between 10 and 15 years. One of the conclusions was also the need of professional education about sex education, prevention and early detection of the sexual abuse of this category of people for the special educators and rehabilitators, the other special staff and parents of the persons with disabilities.