Language Development in Children: Description to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties

Abstract

“Language Development in Children: Description to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties" is focused on the description of language development and the variables affecting the early detection and prevention of language difficulties. Although language difficulties are very common (14%), these difficulties are misdiagnosed due to the lack of visibility and knowledge from professionals of their long-term consequences in education and mental health. To prevent the misdiagnosed identification and assessment of language difficulties, more typical and atypical language studies are needed. In this sense, a good description of language acquisition could help to detect and prevent language difficulties. Nevertheless, most of the research on child language development has been conducted in English and several cross-linguistic studies have shown that some results about language development in English may not be transferred to other languages. Despite the increase in the number of studies, there is still little research about typical and atypical language acquisition in other languages and in bilingual populations. Therefore, this work aims to fill the current void in these studies, give them visibility, and show the latest research about language acquisition in children. In this sense, this work addresses works with several perspectives of child language from a psycholinguistic, psychological, linguistic, and/or educational point of view, including theoretical and empirical studies on typical and atypical child language acquisition and their association with other variables (either social or genetic) that could affect them.