Identification of communication disorders among Egyptian Arabic-speaking nursery schools’ children

BackgroundIdentification of communication disorders during the first years of child’s life leads to early intervention and prevents their negative impact on the child development. To the best of our knowledge, the statistical information that estimates the magnitude of communication disorders among Egyptian children is scarce.ObjectivesThe aim of this prospective study was to identify communication disorders among nursery schools’ children at Dakahlia governorate, Egypt (as a representative sample) in order to estimate the size of the problem among Arabic-speaking Egyptian children.Material and methodsA cross-sectional descriptive research design was used to include 852 nursery school children aged between three and less than 6 years from both urban and rural areas and from governmental and private nurseries. Two structured questionnaire sheets were designed to identify different types of communication disorders from caregiver and teacher perspectives separately besides their socio-demographic data.ResultsThe caregiver responses revealed that 30.8% of the children had language disorders, 2.8% had learning disability, 24% had articulation errors, 17.8% had dysfluency, 2.8% had resonance disorder and 2.4% had voice disorders with a total of 44.4% of the studied sample had communication disorders. A discrepancy was found between the responses of the caregivers and teachers with a total of 30.9% of the children that were identified with a communication problem – as reported by their caregivers – are missed by teachers.ConclusionsThe previous figures reflect the magnitude of the problem of communication disorders among a sample of Egyptian pre-school children which necessitates special attention from different disciplines.