What is DLD?

Approximately 7% of children have a specific language impairment (Tomblin et al., 1997) which cannot be attributed to any physical of genetic cause which persists following school entry and affects their literacy development (Catts et al., 2002), educational attainment (Dockerell et al., 2011) and their employment prospects too (Whitehouse et al., 2009)

Researchers and clinicians have used variety of terms to describe this difficulty: a language disorder, a specific language impairment, SLI, a speech, language and communication need, SLCN, to name but a few. The range of labels has caused confusion for parents, teaching staff, Speech and Language Therapists, other professionals and researchers too.

A recent panel consisting of 57 international experts recently reached a consensus on the term which will be used to describe children who have unexplained, persistent language problems affecting their understanding and/or use of grammar, including word-order, tenses, word-endings, pronouns etc.; vocabulary and word-finding; conversational skills; and language memory: developmental language disorder (Bishop et al., 2017).

In cases where the child has a dual diagnosis i.e. a language disorder and another diagnosed condition e.g. a hearing-impairment or cerebral palsy, this will be termed a language disorder associated with hearing-impairment or deafness or cerebral palsy. It is important to note that this does not mean that the child’s language disorder is attributable solely to the deafness or cerebral palsy.

It is hoped that the use of a single term by Speech and Language Therapists, researchers, parents and all professionals supporting these children, it will raise public awareness of this potentially debilitating, long-term condition as well as informing future research into this area.

Take a look at #devlangdis and #DLD123 on Twitter and www.youtube.com/RADLD (Raising Awareness of Developmental Language Disorder) for more information.