Developmental Language Disorders: Just a name change? The definition of Developmental Language Disorder has been largely debated over the years with many clinicians having long-standing preferences of other terminology, (1.BISHOP). Before looking at the implications of the terminology settlement, we will explore the previous terminology used and the importance and challenges of this and the driving factors for the decision to be made to move to developmental language disorder (DLD) rather than specific language impairment (SLI). Furthermore, we will evaluate and examine the impact that this defining name change will have by looking at the benefits and challenges that will arise from this. 1. History: The first reports we see of language disorders …show more content…
Around the 1940’s, psychiatrists became interested in children who struggled to learn a language but did not appear to have deafness or an accompanying syndrome. Benton gave a comprehensive description of children with the disorder and put forward the idea of a specific disorder of language learning that excluded other conditions such as ASD. The ‘association method’ proposed by McGinnis (1963) as a way of teaching language to ‘aphasic’ children was a very influential method in the development of the field of language disorders and intervention. Expressive and receptive language disorders were new terminologies for speech disorder. Myklebust (1954) establishes the field of ‘language pathology’ and developing techniques for classifying language disorders with children. Chomsky’s (1957) language acquisition research expanded our knowledge on syntax, semantics to pragmatic and phonology. Modern day research involving the brain, has shown that although genetics has an important role to play in this, it is very unlikely to find a single ‘gene for language’ but that there are multiple genes of smaller effect that shape brain development (Fisher