The Influence of Stress on Children’s Speech in the Context of War

Abstract

War is an unpredictable and unbearable burden for the human psyche. Existential threats, fear for life, and loss of loved ones lead to the increase in the incidence of non-psychotic borderline disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Children are the most vulnerable part of the population subject to psychotraumatic experiences. While being in a war zone, they undergo traumatic experiences that deform their consciousness, values, and worldview. Children show signs of mood swings, depression, unprovoked aggression, obsessive behavior, anxiety attacks, and and expect reoccurrence of traumatizing events. The article analyzes speech features of children who have witnessed the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on February 24, 2022. The research explores verbal expressions of young Ukrainian refugees from the war zone, identifies the speech disorders caused by the experienced stress. The study describes specific verbalization of the psychological state of the young witnesses of missile and artillery attacks, the children from the occupied territories as well as those who have not witnessed the military actions but who have had to live in refugee camps. In particular, the paper focuses on the ways to verbalize fear, anxiety, obsessive states, types of verbal aggression and means chosen by the research subjects to talk about deaths of their loved ones.