What is developmental language disorder (DLD)?

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is when children have difficulties with understanding or expressing language. These difficulties affect their everyday lives and don’t go away.

Difficulties with understanding language

Children find it difficult to:

• follow instructions like ‘Get your blue socks from your bottom drawer’
• understand conversations.

Difficulties with expressing language

Children find it difficult to:

• form sentences
• use words in the right order
• use all the words they need
• use the right tense
• find or learn new words
• tell stories.

Children often have difficulties with both understanding and expressing language.

Experts started using the term developmental language disorder in 2017. It has replaced other terms like specific language impairment (SLI), but you might sometimes hear other terms used.

What causes developmental language disorder?

We don’t know exactly what causes DLD. But we do know that DLD tends to run in families.

Around 1 in 14 children in Australia have DLD.

Language delay, speech disorder or language disorder?

DLD is different from language delay, speech disorders and language disorders.

Language delay

If a child has language delay, they have difficulties with understanding or expressing language, but they’re expected to catch up to their peers. For example, the term is often used to describe children aged 2-3 years who understand or use fewer words or phrases than other children of the same age.

DLD is when difficulties with understanding or expressing language aren’t expected to go away.

Speech disorders

If a child has a speech disorder, they have difficulty saying the sounds in words, which makes their speech more difficult to understand. Speech disorders include lisps, stuttering, childhood apraxia of speech or dysarthria. A child might have a speech disorder and DLD.

Language disorder

If a child has a language disorder, they have language difficulties plus other conditions that might explain these difficulties. These conditions include genetic conditions, neurological disorders, intellectual disability, autism or hearing loss.

DLD is a developmental disorder. Developmental disorders, including developmental language disorder, can’t be explained by other conditions.

DLD isn’t part of autism, although autistic children commonly experience difficulties with language.

What are the signs of developmental language disorder?

Many children are slow to use language in the first few years of language development. But by 4 years, most have caught up with other children of the same age.

Difficulties with language at 4-5 years and older can be a sign of developmental language disorder. These include difficulties with:

• learning new words
• using short, simple sentences that have the words needed to make sense
• responding to just part of an instruction
• using tense the right way – for example, they say ‘I skip’ instead of ‘I skipped’ when talking about activities they’ve already done
• finding the right words and using general words like ‘stuff’ or ‘things’ instead
• understanding the meaning of words, sentences or stories
• making conversation.

Sometimes the signs of DLD can be hard to spot. This can happen if children with DLD are experiencing social or behavioural challenges because of their difficulties with communication.

If your child aged over 4 years has language difficulties that are affecting how they communicate and interact at preschool or with family or friends, it’s a good idea to talk to your child’s GP, your child and family health nurse, a teacher or a speech pathologist.

How is developmental language disorder diagnosed?

DLD can be diagnosed from 3 years but is most often diagnosed at 4-5 years.

Health professionals with experience in language development can diagnose DLD. These professionals include speech pathologists.

DLD diagnosis usually also involves educators, teachers and parents. Paediatricians might also be involved.

The diagnosis process might include interviews, observations and language assessments.

How do you treat developmental language disorder?

If your child is diagnosed with DLD, the therapies and support they get will depend on their individual needs.

Therapies and supports will probably aim to help them:

• increase the number of words they know
• build sentences
• form word endings
• practise tenses and pronouns
• understand grammar.

Your child will probably work on these language goals with a speech pathologist.

You or your child’s teachers might be able to help your child work on their language goals at home or school. Your child’s speech pathologist will let you know what you can do.

How to support a child with developmental language disorder

All children learn and develop every day, but children with DLD might take longer to learn how to understand and use language.

At preschool or school

If your child has DLD, they might need help with reading, writing and spelling, learning difficulties or communication with others. Early support can help your child improve their skills in these areas, stay engaged at preschool or school, and feel more confident about learning and interacting with others.

It’s good to talk with your child’s preschool or school about support that might help your child do well.

At home

There are also things you can do at home to encourage and support your child. Here are ideas:

• Celebrate the things your child is good at. These might be sport, music, art, drama or maths. Or your child might be kind and friendly, great at cooking and so on.
• Help your child challenge negative thoughts. For example, ‘Don’t let what happened today get you down. Think about how much you’ve improved this year. You just might need a bit more time and practice to get this right’.
• Encourage your child to think about the support they need to manage their difficulties. For example, do written instructions or visual schedules help? Do they prefer spoken instructions?
• Make sure your child knows that it’s OK to ask for help if they need it and that it’s also OK to make mistakes.

You can help your child feel good about themselves by building their confidence, resilience and self-compassion. Find out how in our articles on resilience for children, self-compassion for children, self-esteem for children, resilience for pre-teens and teenagers, self-compassion for pre-teens and teenagers and confidence for pre-teens and teenagers.