What is a language disorder?

What are Speech, Language and Communication Needs?

Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN) is a broad umbrella category and label which applies to people with any type of communication difficulty or communication vulnerability.

What is a language disorder?

A language disorder is a diagnosis given to a child or young person who has ongoing difficulty with understanding and or using language which has a significant impact on that child or young person’s functioning in everyday life, for example, social and or education.

Some children and young people have a language disorder that is associated with another condition, for example, learning disability, autism, Down’s syndrome, hearing impairment, and brain injury.

Other children have a language disorder that is not associated with another condition. This is known as Developmental Language Disorder (or DLD).

Many children with a language disorder may have other diagnoses as well, such as:

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
• Dyslexia
• Dyspraxia
• Speech difficulties 

What do children and young people with a language disorder have difficulty with?

Every child with a language disorder is unique and will present differently.

They may have difficulty:

• recognising when communication has broken down and need help to fix it
• understanding what people are saying to them
• understanding what they have read
• predicting and problem solving with language (this can be for social events as well as practical events)
• explaining ideas using sentence structures compared with other children of the same age
• telling stories in the right order (it might come out ‘all jumbled’)
• having a conversation

They may:

• leave words out
• say words in the wrong order
• confuse tenses and have other grammar difficulties (for example, use present tense “drinking” for something that happened in the past)

They may also have difficulty:

• understanding and or learning vocabulary in comparison to other children of the same age
• recalling vocabulary (also known as word finding difficulties)
• learning the sounds in words (including longer words such as ‘elephant’ or ‘photosynthesis’)
• understanding multiple word meanings (for example, vocabulary ‘seasons’ – spring, summer, autumn, winter or salt and pepper? and non-literal language ‘you’re on thin ice’)
• interpreting or understanding social situations
• thinking of the answer to a question and may repeat the question or part of their sentence while thinking of the ‘next bit’

Many children with a language disorder have developed relatively good skills to talk about things that are easy to explain or familiar to them. However, they may struggle to adapt their language or use different language structures when talking about things that are complex or less familiar to them.

A language disorder can therefore sometimes be very ‘hidden’ as children and young people learn to ‘get by’ or ‘mask’ their difficulties by using their relative strengths.

Some children and young people have difficulty coping when there is a communication breakdown, when they have not understood, or cannot explain what they want to say, and at these times can show physical or verbal behaviours. For some, this can be for a lot of the time as they feel very frustrated that they cannot understand what is being said around them or to them. It is therefore important that children with behaviour difficulties access assessment of their communication to identify any underlying language needs.