Engage with Developmental Language Disorder: A new project to facilitate research into Developmental Language Disorder

Conducting research on Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is hard. The lack of public awareness of DLD (Thordardottir et al., 2021) contributes to the well-known difficulty recruiting into research studies. The difficulty in conducting DLD research in turn may contribute to the finding that DLD research is underfunded (Bishop, 2010) and under-researched, given DLD’s prevalence and impact (Bishop, 2010; McGregor, 2020). The Engage with Developmental Language Disorder (or E-DLD) project aims to help address the difficulties in recruiting individuals to take part in DLD research. E-DLD is an international database of individuals and families affected by DLD. E-DLD members are regularly informed about DLD research projects and given the opportunity to take part in these studies. Currently, 85 parents and five adults with DLD have signed up. Average age of the children is 8.4 years, 83.5% are monolingual, 86% have siblings and 69% are from the UK. Nine non-UK countries are represented. Expressive language problems are experienced by 94% of the children, with 73% experiencing receptive language difficulties and 80% word finding difficulties. Approximately 30.6% of the children have parent-reported anxiety problems. Initial results from the integrated research study indicate that these children, as a whole, have elevated rates of emotional, hyperactivity and peer problems as measured by the SDQ. The means for hyperactivity and peer problems were above the “slightly raised” normative cutoff, with the mean for emotional problems above the “high” normative cutoff. The E-DLD project holds enormous potential to close the gap in this under-researched field.