What is a receptive language disorder?

Receptive language includes the skills involved in understanding language. Receptive language disorders are difficulties in the ability to attend to, process, comprehend, and/or retain spoken language.

Receptive language disorder means the child has difficulties with understanding what is said to them. The symptoms vary between individuals but, generally, problems with language comprehension usually begin before the age of four years.

Other names for receptive language disorder include central auditory processing disorder and comprehension deficit. In most cases the child also has an expressive language disorder, which means they have trouble using spoken language.