Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate the general development, receptive and expressive language, articulation and motor speech skills of randomly selected children aged 3-6;11 years diagnosed with any of food, asthma and hay fever allergies. Method: In the period 2022-2023, 50 children aged 3-6;11 years (28M; 22F), who were selected using simple random sampling technique from the allergy outpatient clinic of the state city hospital in Istanbul and from a municipality- affiliated kindergarten where only children diagnosed with allergy that attended kindergarten, were included. 15 of the children were diagnosed with asthma, 20 with food allergy and 15 with hay allergy. A consent form was signed by the parents of the children included in the study, and their general development was evaluated with the Ankara Developmental Screening Inventory (AGTE; Savaşır, Sezgin, & Erol, 1995), articulation development with the Articulation and Phonology Test (SST; Topbaş, 2006), receptive and expressive language development with the Turkish Early Language Development Test (TELD-3-TR; Topbaş & Güven, 2013), and motor speech development with the Dynamic Evaluation of Motor Speech Skill Turkish Version (DEMMS-TR; Karamete, 2021). Scores were recorded and results were compared in percentages. Results: When the general development of the participants was analysed according to the results of the AGTE, it was observed that 48% of the participants showed developmental delay, 36% showed advanced development, 10% showed suspicious development, and 6% showed normal development. 65% of children with food allergy, 53% of children with asthma and 20% of children with hay fever showed general developmental delay compared to their peers. According to the results of the TEDIL Receptive Language Subtest, 2% of the participants had good, 2% had above average, 54% had average, 10% had below average, 22% had poor and 10% had very poor receptive language skills. Based on 85 standard scores, 42% of the participants showed below average receptive language skills. According to the results of the TEDİL Expressive Subtest, 4% of the participants had above average, 66% had average, 12% had below average, 8% had poor and 10% had very poor expressive language skills. Based on 85 standardised points, 34% of the participants showed below average expressive language skills. When the participants' articulation skills were analysed with the SST-SAT test, 34% had normal development, 18% had mild problems, 22% had moderate problems, 10% had advanced problems and 16% had very advanced problems. Articulation disorders were present in 66% of the participants. Finally, according to the results of the motor speech evaluation of the participants with DEMSS-TR, 2% of the participants had mild speech apraxia and 4% had moderate speech apraxia. Conclusion: It is observed that the general development, receptive and expressive language, articulation and motor speech skills of children with asthma, food and hay allergy may lag behind their peers. This study emphasises the importance of developmental follow-up of children with allergy in different developmental components in early childhood. It is thought that these results may be the result of multiple factors such as frequent recurrent otitis media, lack of breast milk or deprivation of different foods due to food allergy, school nonattendance and/or social isolation. This subject, which has limited studies in the literature, needs to be followed up in more detail.
Keywords
allergy, asthma, disorder, food, hay fever, language, speech
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