Specific Language Impairment and Language Delay: an Analysis of Developmental Language Disorder Characteristics in a Group of Romanian Children

Abstract

One of the main categories of language disorders involves delays in language development. Both academic studies and clinical experience show that not all children easily learn how to speak. According to some authors, about 7% of kindergarten-aged children (roughly 4 to 5 years old) have various disorders that can be classified as language delay (Prelock and Hutchins, 2018; Tomblin, Records, Buckwalter, Zhang, Smith, and O’Brien, 1997; Tomblin, Zhang, Buckwalter, and O’Brien, 2003). The terminology used for these disorders is not homogeneous. Romanian speech and language therapy practice does not clearly distinguish between language delay (LD) and specific language impairment (SLI) or developmental language disorder (DLD), which is the most recent name for this language condition (Bishop, Snowling, Thompson, and Greenhalgh, 2017).