Study on the Development of Personality Traits in Children with Language Disorders and Children without Language Disorders

Abstract

This study aims to investigate possible differences in the formation and development of personality traits for children with various language disorders and children who do not have language disorders from a neuropsychological perspective. The child's personality is a psychological and social construct with strong implications on how to relate it to the surrounding individuals and brain function. During childhood, the individual manifests a variety of typologies of behavior and attitudes depending on the context in which they are, so personality traits are formed as a result of existing interactions and the family and educational context. In the case of children with different language disorders, the personality must be structured in a more secure and stable emotional environment, leading to the development of adaptation capacities to the external environment and an increase in stress resistance. Emotions and moods play a significant role in the development of personality traits. In this sense, we have started the research that aims to analyze the personality traits of children with speech difficulties and those who do not have these difficulties. The participants in this study are 60 children aged 7-12 years old from urban areas. The method used is represented by the HiPIC - Hierarchical Personality Inventory for Children (I Mervielde and Filip de Fruyt), a psychological tool for assessing the personality of children aged 6 to 13 and is based on the established Big Five model. The inventory is a personality HiPIC contains 144 items and allows the evaluation of the emotional, interpersonal, motivational and behavioral style of children based on the five dimensions of personality. Parametric statistical methods were used to identify possible differences between the two groups of participants in research. Also factor loadings and correlations between factors as results of exploratory factor analyses were evaluated. The study outputs confirms existing differences in the development of certain personality traits, the specificity being given by the situations experienced in the educational environment, the family environment and in the context of the process of recovering and improving the language disorders.