ALALIA IS A TERM FOR THE INABILITY OF SPONTANEOUS SPEECH DEVELOPMENT WITH ADEQUATE HEARING. ALALIA MEANS "WITHOUT SPEECH".

A CHILD THAT HAS NOT YET PRODUCED SPEECH DOES NOT HAVE RECORDED SPEECH FUNCTIONS IN THE CORTEX. THESE FUNCTIONS ARE YET TO BE DEVELOPED.

After involving a child in speech therapy, and after the initial development of speech, alalia becomes a speech language disorder, i.e. developmental dysphasia.

Developmental dysphasia includes pathologically undeveloped speech and language which the child uses for basic understanding. Dysphasia represents a complex syndrome of physiological, linguistic, educational and social problems with an underlying disorder in verbal communication.

These disorders affect vocabulary, semantics, grammar, morphology and syntax, i.e. deep linguistic structures, and they include problems of forming sounds.

Speech is manifested with a lack of a large number of sounds, the substitution of the existing sounds with non-existent ones, variable distortions and restricted vocabulary. It is related to the immediate situation, and the sentences are agrammatical and conceptually reduced.

In some cases, the child understands part of speech of his or her environment, and uses gesture and mimicry as an extra communication method.

In the most severe cases, the child cannot understand other people's speech, along with not speaking himself.