Portugal

The earliest reference to developmental speech and language disorders in the Portuguese literature is the seminal master’s dissertation of Eileen Sua Kay, from the 1990s, which describes the grammatical features of the discourse of children with a language disorder referred to as Perturbação Específica da Linguagem (PEL) (‘specific language impairment’) (Sua Kay, 1998). PEL is characterized as a difficulty in language acquisition and development, with no apparent cause, i.e. not due to any cognitive, neurological, motor, sensory or emotional disturbance, inadequate and insufficient linguistic input, along the lines of what the international literature refers to as specific language impairment (SLI) (e.g. Bishop, 1992, 1997; Chevrie-Muller and Narbona, 1996; Leonard, 1991, among others). Sua Kay (1998) also reports that up to that point the terms used to label these language difficulties in clinical practice were Afasia de Desenvolvimento and Disfasia (‘developmental aphasia’ and ‘dysphasia’), due to the existence of some common superficial features between this disorder and adult aphasia. The archives of the Centro de Medicina de Reabilitação de Alcoitão, the rehabilitation centre funded in 1966 and the first school for the training of speech and language therapists (SLTs) in Portugal (Guimarães, 2013), employed these two terms in the clinical diagnosis of children from the 1980s (Valido, personal communication, 27 June 2018).