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Specific language impairment
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Specific language impairment (SLI) is a developmental language disorder that can affect both expressive and receptive language. SLI is defined as a "pure" language impairment, meaning that is not related to or caused by other developmental disorders, hearing loss or acquired brain injury.
However, the term specific language impairment is typically used in research literature, while other equivalent terms include: language impairment, language disability, language disorder, language delay, and language deviance. All of these terms belie assumptions about the nature of normal development, and some have been dropped as new perspectives on language development arise.
An SLI therefore is a general marker meaning language disorder, and not a specific disorder or disease.
Overview:
SLI is used to refer to problems in the acquisition and use of language, typically in the context of normal development. Whether it refers to individuals with normal overall cognitive development is controversial (Cohen, 2002).
- Individuals with SLI exhibit problems in combining and selecting speech sounds of language into meaningful units (phonological awareness). These problems are different to speech impairments that arise from difficulties in coordination of oral-motor musculature (Cohen, 2002).
- Symptoms include the use of short sentences, have problems producing and understanding syntactically complex sentences. It is also associated with an impoverished vocabulary, word finding problems, and difficulty learning new words, whereas the basic tasks for development of phonology and syntax are completed in childhood, vocabulary continues to grow in adulthood (Bishop, 1997 as cited in Cohen, 2002).
See also
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