Words for Wellbeing – Quality of life and language impairment in adolescents and young adults

We aim to adapt a vocabulary assessment tool to Norwegian and try it out on different groups of adolescents and young adults with and without language impairments. Furthermore, we will investigate whether language impairments affect young people’s mental health by investigating their quality of life.

Background

Language and communication difficulties can lead to challenges with social functioning, learning and being able to do everyday things such as following a recipe, reading an instruction manual or a letter from the government.

Adolescents and young adults who have language and communication difficulties are consequently at greater risk of a number of negative developmental outcomes.

They are over-represented among students who drop out of upper secondary school, they have a greater risk of mental health problems, they are over-represented among young people in contact with the judicial system and have a greater risk of being dependent on disability pension.

There are several and complex reasons why adolescents and young adults may have difficulties with language and communication, such as developmental language disorders, hearing loss or because they are minority language users and therefore have challenges with the language spoken around them at school or in the workplace.

In order to provide proper help to these people, good language assessment tools are needed. As of today, there are no language tests for this age group in Norwegian.

Purpose

• Adapting and piloting a receptive vocabulary assessment tool to Norwegian.
• Investigate whether there is a connection between language skills and quality of life for different participant groups.