Milevska O.P. The semantic dominant features of word perception in children with general speech underdevelopment

Contact: Olena Milevska, Ph.D. in Pedagogy, associate professor of Speech Therapy and Special methods Department of the faculty of correctional and social pedagogy and psychology, Kamianets-Podilskyi Ivan Ohienko National University, Ukraine. Scientific interests: organizational, didactic, and methodological aspects of speech therapy. 

The skills of speech perception are a prerequisite for the formation of complete knowledge and representations of the child about the world in the form of concepts and generalizations.  The child learns to establish relationships between linguistic units, learns the operations of semantic structuring, and establishes lexical and semantic relationships. Such skills develop in accordance with ontogenetic laws and form the basis of speech-thinking activity. These include a gradual transition from the phonetic level of speech perception to the semantic. The first based on the orientation strategy on the acoustic attributes of words during their perception; the second based on the orientation strategy on the semantic characteristics of the word. The semantic dominant of word perception acts as the most productive strategy for the assimilation of its meaning. For the category of children with general speech underdevelopment, specific patterns of the development of skills of semantic speech perception are characteristic, which determined by their primary violations of speech mechanisms, in particular lexical-semantic structuring mechanisms. The article presents the content and results of the study of the features of semantic speech perception (based on words) by younger students with general speech underdevelopment. Methodological methods for studying the specifics of obtaining, processing, and reproducing the information reflected in words are proposed for these children. The author found that these children have difficulties in establishing lexical-semantic relations. Also, found a typology of these difficulties has been implemented. This study found features of language operations of categorization and transformation of words that are performed by children with general speech underdevelopment. The features of the ongoing language operations of categorization and transformation of words. The leading strategies of semantic perception of words that are used by younger students with a general underdevelopment of speech are defined - intuitively practical, lexical and grammatical (morphological), acoustic (phonetic). In some cases, an associative explanation of word meanings was observed. The semantic dominant of word perception turned out to be inaccessible for the children in the study. The results of the study make it possible to determine special conditions, including orienting them towards the development of special tasks for the formation of semantic dominance in the perception of words in younger students with a general underdevelopment of speech.

Key words: primary schoolchildren with general speech underdevelopment, lexical semantics, semantic relations, categorization, transformation, semantic perception.