Quality of life in DLD (Larson, 2024)

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a lifelong condition associated with poorer outcomes than neurotypical peers, yet relatively little is known about long-term quality of life in DLD. This preliminary study adopts a neurodiversity-informed approach by exploring self-reported quality of life in an adolescent and young adult DLD sample, as well as linguistic and risk factors contributing to quality of life.

Method: Participants were five individuals with DLD aged 12–20 years (M = 15.60, SD = 3.05). I administered two self-report quality-of-life scales, a language assessment, an experimental morphosyntax task, and measures of risk factors. Data were analyzed descriptively.

Results: Participants generally reported positive views about their quality of life, although accessing accommodations and health services emerged as barriers. Relatively better grammaticality judgment performance appeared to be linked with poorer ratings of happiness and the ability to “be yourself.” Nonverbal ability represented a potential risk factor, although there may be a stronger cumulative role for risk factors.

Conclusions: Participants with DLD reported relatively good quality of life. Exploratory findings suggest barriers to quality of life in some contexts, as well as roles for individual differences in language and risk factors. These descriptive findings should be examined in larger scale studies and may represent areas of consideration when clinicians address functional challenges that impact mental health and well-being in individuals with DLD.

Supplemental Material S1. DLD CELF-5 scores.

Supplemental Material S2. Group-level participant characteristics.

Supplemental Material S3. Speech-language and specialized services history.

Supplemental Material S4. Standards for reporting descriptive research methods checklist (O’Brien et al., 2014).

Supplemental Material S5. By-participant socioeconomic and health-related risk factors.

Supplemental Material S6. Quality of life questionnaire results; means and standard deviations reported.

Supplemental Material S7. Correlations between quality of life and language measures.

Larson, C. (2024). Exploring self-reported quality of life in developmental language disorder. Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_PERSP-24-00122