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The article discusses various concepts of the norm in speech-language therapy. The aim of the article is to present the complexity of the topic. The author considers various determinants of linguistic and communicative behaviour in the verbal form and the related methods of describing the norm. The essential requirement for correct diagnosis and therapy of persons with speech disorders of various aetiologies is knowledge and experience sufficient to determine the meaning of individual terms designating the disorders, taking into account interdisciplinary methods of defining the norm. This explains also the importance of ensuring proper standards of education allowing to perform independent, correct and reliable diagnosis and speech-language therapy.

Down’s syndrome is one of the most common and easily detected genetic disorders. People with Down’s syndrome are characterised by multisystemic structural and functional irregularities (incl. congenital disease and heart defects, disorders of hearing and vision) appearing in life as well as a characteristic phenotype. Its phenotype characteristics include delayed psychomotor development. Children with this syndrome demonstrate a particular profile in the acquisition of communicative abilities. The level of development of communicative competence reached by children with DS is peculiar, different from that of other neuro-developmental disorders, and various in relation to the level reached by children at a similar level of cognitive functioning, but whose cognitive problems have a different etiology. This article attempts to characterise the factors determining the basis of speech development in this group and to indicate the characteristic features of communication among people with Down’s syndrome.

The subject of the paper is the way of conceptualization, linguistic depiction of the names of colours by adult persons who were born blind and the ones who became blind at the age of 3–5 and kept some visual images in their memories. The material for the study was obtained by conversations via phone. The respondents were nine randomly chosen members of a Facebook group “The blinds and the visually impaired ones – let’s be together!”, namely 4 women and 5 men. As the results of the study show, the extent and way of using other senses for describing colours depends on the moment when the sight was lost. The congenitally blind people defined the colours relying on the senses of smell and touch rather than sound, while the ones who became blind in the early childhood find the sense of taste the most helpful and the sense of smell the least useful in that.

The article is the third part of a study concerned with vocabulary in autism spectrum disorders. The subject of interest in this article is the category of relations and its lexical exponents. The author presents various types of linguistically expressed relations. She discusses how they are represented in the language of people with autism spectrum disorders and devotes a separate fragment to parts of speech. The acquisition of relational concepts and their lexical exponents is a significant development challenge; especially difficult for people with autism. In the category of relations the differences between the vocabularies of typically developing people and people with autistic disorders are the most pronounced. Other conclusions from the
analysis carried out are in line with those in the second part of the study concerning the category of things and events.

Language disorders in schizophrenia are a natural occurance in the classifications of language disorders. However, there are still no standards of speech therapy that provide efficient therapeutic procedure. In the presented article, the author referred to schizophasia interpreted as a disorder of the content and form of expression. Both these phenomena should be the subject of speech therapy for schizophatic people. A speech therapist may be a fully fledged member of the therapeutic team together with a psychiatrist, psychologist, psychotherapist, occupational therapy specialist, and other medical staff.

Alcohol consumption by a woman during pregnancy may result in a number of developmental disorders in her offspring, known as (fetal alcohol syndrome – FAS). They relate to, among others, acquisition of language and communication competence problems, manifested, among others, by incorrect articulation, deficits in inflection and syntax, and irregularities in creating narrative forms of expression. The subject of this paper is describing of a picture by ten-year-olds with fetal alcohol syndrome and their peers from a control group. Findings indicate that children with FAS have difficulty using the following procedures: generalization of events, spatiality of description, presentability of events, and characterization of elements of reality. These people, while creating descriptions of pictures, usually do not use formulas that allow to begin a statement and present the content of the described events, introduce individual space plans in a disorderly manner, do not use the right wording, omit many important details related to the characteristics of individual elements of reality and the relationships that occur between them. The abnormalities mentioned above are related to the poverty of content and the abnormal structure of texts constructed by ten-year-olds with FAS.

The article presents the results of research on health-related behaviors and the experience of subjective vocal ailments by students (n = 208) and teachers (n = 120). The procedure used the VHI (Voice Handicap Index) test to measure the level of voice disability and the IZZ test (Health Behavior Index) to measure the categories of health behaviors in the field of: correct eating habits, preventive behavior, positive mental attitude and health practices. Data from structured interview sheets were also used. In the case of teachers, there were statistically significant relationships between the results of the VHI test and correct eating habits, and between preventive behaviors. Among the studied students, a smaller number of statistically significant correlations between the occurrence of subjective vocal ailments and health habits was noted.

The unregulated legal status of the speech and language therapy profession and speech and language therapy as an independent scientific discipline are reasons for significant differences in the way SLTs are educated in Poland. In order to find out the opinions of students and graduates of SLT studies (working in the profession) on academic education, the survey was conducted with 87 participants. Conducting the survey in the conditions of a pandemic situation also made it possible to assess distance forms of teaching and revealed disproportions in the level of satisfaction with practical and theoretical courses conducted in this form. The collected opinions form the basis for the reflections undertaken in the article on SLT and the possible and necessary changes in the system of training future SLTs.

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