[Clinical forms of infantile dysphasias]

By 'Dysphasias' we mean disorders of language development in children, as opposed to Aphasias which is the term used for loss of previously acquired language as a consequence of focal cerebral lesions. The definition of Dysphasia refers to alteration in the expression or comprehension of language which cannot be explained by deafness, motor deficit, mental retardation, brain damage, emotional disorders or insufficient exposure to language (DSM IV). Even within this definition there is room for different criteria for inclusion. This is shown by the lack of homogeneity in the populations studied by different authors, depending to some degree on the age of the children studied (the symptoms and signs of dysphagia are not the same in a 3 year old child as in one of school age) and the intellectual level required to rule out mental deficiency. Once the differential diagnosis with other conditions has been established, we should try to situate the dysphasia as being due to faulty reception, emission or both. Allen and Rapin have defined 4 categories of Dysphasia with subtypes which permit more specific classification within the two spheres mentioned above (reception and emission). In the sphere of emission, with characteristics of lack of fluency of speech and better comprehension than elocution are: syntactic phonological deficit syndrome, phonological programming deficit syndrome, verbal dyspraxia and lexical syntactic deficit syndrome. In the sphere of reception, with comprehension more affected than elocution are: verbal auditory agnosia and pragmatic semantic syndrome. Although the work of Allen and Rafin was done on a population of English-speaking children, this classification has also been shown to be useful in the Spanish language. We give a detailed description of these syndromes, illustrating them with video recordings of clinical cases.