Enhancing Developmental Language Disorder Identification with Artificial Intelligence: Development of an Explainable Screening App Using Real and Synthetic Data

Purpose: This study aims to evaluate key linguistic markers for distinguishing children with developmental language disorder (DLD) from their typically developing (TD) peers and to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-based, explainable screening app. Method: Thirty children aged 7–10 (15 with DLD and 15 TD) completed a verbal assessment battery measuring vocabulary production, morphosyntactic abilities, and sentence repetition. Based on these data, a random forest classifier was trained on synthetically generated datasets to develop an online, explainable screening app. Results: Bayesian analyses provided strong evidence for significant group differences across all three linguistic measures. The screening app, when validated on unseen cases, demonstrated high concordance with clinical diagnoses made by speech-language pathologists, indicating its reliability in identifying children with DLD. Conclusion: These findings support the diagnostic value of specific linguistic indicators in identifying DLD and demonstrate the feasibility of an AI-driven screening solution. The app’s interpretability and scalability offer practical advantages for detection, particularly in under-resourced settings, by reducing subjectivity and time demands in the diagnostic process. Moreover, this study highlights the potential of synthetic data augmentation to overcome limitations associated with small clinical datasets, thereby enhancing the robustness and generalizability of AI-based screening apps.