This article describes the results of an epidemiological study of developmental language disorder (DLD) in an isolated rural Russian population. We report an atypically high prevalence of DLD across all age groups when contrasted with a comparison population. The results are corroborated by a set of comparisons of school-aged children from the target population with their age peers and mean length of utterance matches from the comparison population. We also investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognition, verbal working memory, and expressive language performance in the population, and find statistically significant but small effect sizes. Finally, we describe the complex and heterogeneous structure of the phenotype in the population along with patterns of its vertical transmission on the basis of the exemplar pedigrees, and discuss the implications of our findings for genetic and clinical studies of DLD.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)971-1003
Number of pages33
JournalApplied Psycholinguistics
Volume34
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013

    Scopus subject areas

  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Psychology(all)

ID: 87384898