By Cynthia Marshall Schuman

If you’ve ever traveled to a country whose language you didn’t know, then you can appreciate the frustration of not understanding what’s being said to you and not being able to articulate your own thoughts clearly. This is an everyday problem for children with specific language impairment.

Specific language impairment is a disorder in which language development - the order of nouns and verbs; the placement of question words; and other issues of grammar, syntax and pronunciation - does not take place or is incomplete.

For example, someone with the disorder might say, “I run to the store,” when what they intend to say is, “I ran to the store.”

Carol Subrahmanyam, a local speech pathologist, will discuss “Language and Your Child: Techniques to Facilitate Development,” 6:30-8 p.m., Sept. 19, at the Center for Speech, Language and Occupational Therapy, Inc., 1577 Carob Lane, Los Altos.

The causes of specific language impairment in children are not clear. “There are often kids where you don’t really know why. For whatever reasons, they are just slow to develop. We have a lot of groups and we start very early with kids that have been identified as being behind, as young as 18 months,” Subrahmanyam said.

For more information on the talk, call 948-7189.