ABSTRACT
The study of language disorders is conducted within many contexts that provide motivation for this research. One of these contexts is concerned with descriptive and explanatory accounts of individual differences in the development of communication skills. In this respect, the study of developmental language disorders (DLD) is part of a more general area of inquiry concerning the ways in which children differ with respect to communication development. As Revelle (2000) noted, there is an infinite number of ways in which individuals may differ from each other. How-ever, psychological accounts attempt to reduce this number to a small set of latent traits that may account for a substantial amount of this variation. Once these latent dimensions of individual differences can be identified, we are then able to pose and test reasonable hypotheses that aim to explain these differences.
