ABSTRACT
The acquisition of spoken language is a universal property of humans. For most children, language is successfully acquired with relative ease in the span of a few years without formal training by adult caregivers. There are some children, however, who are challenged by the demands of language acquisition and, as a result, are unable to meet the communicative, educational, and social expectations of their society. These children with developmental language disorders fall into several groups. Some children with language impairment may have concomitant problems such as pervasive cognitive, social/emotional, or motor problems, that interfere with language learning and use. However, a number of children exhibit unexpected and, to date, unexplained difficulties in the acquisition of spoken language that are not associated with other developmental disorders. These have been referred to as children with specific language impairment (SLI).
