**1. Introduction**

Specific language impairment (SLI) [1–4] is a diagnosis in children with disordered or delayed language development without any reason for the disorder or delay. In children with this disorder, there are specific delays in the mastery of language skills without other developmental delays or hearing loss. Other names for this disorder include developmental dysphasia (DD), which it is frequently referred to in the Czech language, as well as language delay or developmental language disorder. Developmental language disorders are among the most

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common learning disorders in children. Approximately 5–7% of all children aged 4–12 years old have these disorders [5]. The impact of these disorders in real life is that a child does not have the same speech skills as other children of the same age because his or her speech skills are delayed. Children with SLI fail to acquire their native language properly or completely despite having normal nonverbal intelligence, a lack of hearing problems, a lack of known neurological dysfunctions and a lack of behavioral, emotional or social problems [4]. These experiences can disrupt children's social lives and separate children from their contemporaries, which can create a specific social barrier. There is a relationship between the development of a child's language skills, age and success with treatment.

The determination that SLI includes a significant genetic component was demonstrated in various studies of heritability, for example, in a study of genetic etiology, a study of twins and a study of family evaluations [6]. SLI affected more boys than girls in another study [5]. The manifestation of the disorder primarily occurs in manipulating the linguistic rules of derivation and inflection, resulting in incorrect syntactic structures in their native tongue. Furthermore, there is reduced development of vocabulary at early ages. Usually, the production of language for those with the disorder is worse than their language comprehension. Various difficulties can be present in children with SLI in nonlinguistic cognitive skills, for example, motor ability, mental rotation or executive functions [7]. Other difficulties can be associated with impairments in reading and problems with working memory [8–11]. Many studies evaluate the problem underlying and causing the observed language difficulties. In these studies, theories of language acquisition as well as language representation and processing have been applied [4, 12]. The most frequently listed hypotheses for the causes of SLI are as follows:


The Laboratory of Artificial Neural Network Applications (LANNA) [16] at the Czech Technical University in Prague, with the participation of R&D Laboratory at the Military Technical Institute, collaborates on a project with the Department of Paediatric Neurology, 2nd Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Prague, and with the Motol University Hospital. The project focuses on children with SLI. A partial aim of this project is to obtain data about SLI and speech disorders using automatic utterance analysis by self-organizing neural networks. The goal of this research is to determine the parameters that correspond to correlations across the results generated from diagnostics (from several different specialists, for example, speech therapists and specialists, psychologists, neurologists, and EEG and MRI tractography) and tests. LANNA uses methods based on computer speech analysis to determine whether children have SLI.
