Larger brain and white matter volumes in children with developmental language disorder

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is predominantly a language disorder, but children with DLD also manifest nonlanguage impairments, and neuroanatomical abnormalities have been found in multiple areas of the brain, not all languageassociated. We therefore performed a whole brain general segmentation analysis of all major brain regions on MRI scans of 24 DLD subjects (16M, 8F) and 30 controls (15M, 15F), ages 5.7 to 11.3 years. Children with DLD showed increased total brain volume, driven predominantly by a substantial increase in the volume of cerebral white matter. Cerebral cortex and caudate were relatively but not absolutely smaller in DLD. These findings are discussed in relation to issues of specificity vs. generality as they arise in debates about (1) modular vs. general processing deficits and connectionist modeling in DLD, (2) languagespecific vs. pervasive, non-specific deficits in DLD and (3) specificity of the disorder vs. overlap with other disorders, notably autism.