Prevalence and Predictors of Developmental Language Disorder at Preschool Age
Pasquale Rinaldi, Maria Cristina Caselli, Ilaria Simonelli, Lorena Remi, Francesca Romana Lasorsa, Arianna Bello
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose etiopathogenetic mechanisms are still unknown and which results in persistent difficulties in language acquisition. The aims of this retrospective population study are to estimate the prevalence of DLD in monolingual Italian children and to investigate, among biological and parental variables, as well as communicative and linguistic behaviours detected at 27-30 months through the Italian MB-CDI questionnaire, significant risk factors of DLD. The sample consisted of 528 families whose children participated in a screening programme when they were between 27 and 30 months old. When children were on average 8.05 years old, parents were given an interview designed to collect information about the children’s language development. The results show a higher prevalence of children with DLD at 4-5 years of age (11.7%) than observed in previous studies. Diagnosis of DLD is significantly predicted by verbal imitation and by the combination of vocabulary size (presence/absence of RL) and two-word combination. Children who at 27-30 months have a vocabulary size
Keywords
Predictors of DLD, Prevalence of DLD, Language delay, Risk factors, Retrospective population study.
