This epidemiologic study estimated the prevalence of specific language impairment (SLI) in monolingual English-speaking kindergarten children. From a stratified cluster sample in rural, urban, and suburban areas in the upper midwest, 7,218 children were screened. The language screening failure rate was 26.2%. Children who failed the screening and a similar number of controls were then administered a diagnostic battery (n = 2,084) that provided for a diagnosis of SLI using common diagnostic standards. Results provided an estimated overall prevalence rate of 7.4%. The prevalence estimate for boys was 8% and for girls 6%. Variation in prevalence was found among children of different racial/cultural backgrounds; however, these background variables were found to be correlated with parental education, which was also associated with SLI. The parents of 29% of the children identified as SLI reported they had previously been informed that their child had a speech or language problem.The prevalence estimates obtained fell within recent estimates for SLI, but demonstrated that this condition is more prevalent among females than has been previously reported. Also, the clinical identification of these children remains low among kindergarteners.

A valid and reliable diagnostic standard for language impairment is required for the conduct of epidemiologic research on specific language disorder. A rationale is provided for such a diagnostic system labeled the EpiSLI system. This system employed five composite scores representing norm-referenced performance in three domains of language (vocabulary, grammar, and narration) and two modalities (comprehension and production). Children who have two or more composite scores below –1.25 standard deviations were considered as children with language disorder. The performance of the EpiSLI diagnostic system was examined on a sample of 1,502 kindergarten children and it was shown that this diagnostic system yielded results that were consistent with clinician rating and previous research results.

Two sets of diagnostic measures were administered to a group of 35 adults with welldocumented histories of specific language impairment and to a control group of 35 normal language users. These measures involved the comprehension and production of words and sentences in formal and spontaneous speaking activities as well as measures of verbal memory and auditory temporal perceptual ability. One set of tasks was administered in a standard face-to-face setting and the other set was given over the telephone. Multivariate and univariate tests indicated that the adults with a history of specific language impairment performed more poorly on all tasks administered. A discriminant analysis of the two sets of measures indicated that four measures in each set identified language-impaired individuals with 97 & #x25; accuracy for the face-to-face battery and 95 & #x25; accuracy for the telephone battery. These results suggest that it should be possible to diagnose specific language impairment in the adult family members of children with specific language impairment and therefore permit accurate construction of pedigrees for specific language impairment.

When a child is diagnosed as having a language disorder, parents may ask the speech-language pathologist questions such as "How might this language disorder affect my child’s life?" Unfortunately, professionals have little empirical information upon which to base an answer to this question. The purpose of this paper is to provide information regarding reported quality of life (QOL) for a group of young adults with histories of mild to severe specific language impairment who had received language treatment. A QOL measurement tool was developed to gather information about personal happiness, life satisfaction, and status in various life domains (e.g,, education, occupation, family/social life). This QOL survey was used with 29 young adults with language impairments ( M = 21:6 years) and 29 controls ( M = 20:4 years). The results indicated no statistically significant differences between the two groups in the various subjective components of quality of life.

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