The reason for the sex difference is not well understood.Poor motor skills are commonly found in children with DLD. Standardized measures of motor ability confirm that children with DLD exhibit deficits in fine and gross motor skill, both simple and complex. These difficulties also extend to speech-motor ability, particularly with the control of their articulatory movements. Children with DLD have difficulty with motor sequence learning and may show deficits in other procedural motor processes as well.Brain scans do not usually reveal any obvious abnormalities in children with DLD, although quantitative comparisons have found differences in brain size or relative proportions of white or grey matter in specific regions. In some cases, unusual brain gyri are found. To date, no consistent neural signature for DLD has been found, although some studies have noted evidence for involvement of subcortical systems. Differences in the brains of children with DLD versus typically developing children are subtle and may overlap with atypical patterns seen in other neurodevelopmental disorders. Diagnosis
DLD is defined purely in behavioural terms: there is no biological test.
Word finding – Children with word finding difficulties may know a word, but have difficulty accessing it for production – similar to the tip of the tongue phenomenon. Pragmatics – Pragmatics refers to the ability to select the appropriate message, or interpret what others say, in relation to context. Pragmatic difficulties can give an impression of oddity, with the content of language not fitting the environmental or social context; comprehension may be over-literal; the child may chatter incessantly, be poor at turn-taking in conversation and maintaining a topic
Discourse – Discourse refers to a level of organization of language beyond the sentence. Child with limitations in this domain may have limited ability to tell a story or describe a set of events in a logical sequence
Verbal memory and learning – Problems with remembering words or sentences can affect both the learning of new vocabulary, and the understanding of long or complex sentences. Young children with DLD may say their first words later than other children. It may also take children with DLD longer to learn and remember novel words. Phonology – Phonology is the branch of linguistics concerned with the way sounds are combined in words. Children with difficulties with phonology may fail to distinguish between certain speech sounds, such as t and k, so that cake is produced as tate. Such difficulties are not unusual as part of typical development in toddlers, but they would usually resolve by the time children are 4–5 years old.