The treatment group consists of 20 children diagnosed with DLD (Language Development Disorder).

The participants were randomly assigned and will undergo a structured rehabilitation programme of parent training + speech therapy

The control group consisted of 20 children diagnosed with DLD (Language Development Disorder).

Participants were randomly assigned and were subjected to standard therapy approaches, which included traditional speech therapy provided by qualified therapists.

The intervention was tailored to individual needs and aimed at improving verbal expression, communicative initiative, and social engagement. Each child receives therapy for a period of 16 weeks, for a total of 32 sessions, twice a week, with each session lasting 45 minutes and in addition 16 sessions of parent traning once a week for 45 minutes.Intervention sessions included tasks designed to engage the child in verbal and social interactions, (such as naming objects, answering questions and performing gestures) to improve verbal expression communicative intention and social engagement, in parallel the parents once a week participate in a parent training session with the aim of supporting and directing them to learn strategies to improve interaction with the child and facilitate communicative-linguistic development

The Test of Verbalization and Language Development is a standardized tool designed to assess various aspects of language development, including verbal production, comprehension, sentence construction, phonological accuracy, and morphosyntactic abilities. The weighted score ranges from 0 to 10, with higher scores indicating better language development.

The Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) is a caregiver-reported questionnaire used to identify emotional and behavioral problems in children. It measures multiple domains, including emotional reactivity, anxiety, attention problems, and social difficulties. The T-scores do not have a specific range, but values between 50 and 70 are considered within the normal range, while 70 to 100 indicates clinical significance. Higher scores indicate greater behavioral problems.

This instrument consists of different forms that consider the three fundamental domains of parent-child interaction: a) the social domain: assessed through 8 items; b) the educational domain: assessed through 7 items; c) the disciplinary domain: assessed through 2 items. In this study, each parent completed four forms of the questionnaire: one assessing what their parental behaviour is like in reality (real style; Form A), one assessing what they would ideally like their own behaviour to be like (ideal style; Form B), one assessing what their partner's parental behaviour is like in reality (real style; Form C) and one assessing what they would ideally like their partner's parental behaviour to be like (ideal style; Form D).

It assesses individuals' perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, norms and standards.

The WHOQOL-BRIEF is a 26-item self-report instrument that assesses four domains that are assumed to represent the Quality of Life (QOL) construct: the physical domain, the psychological domain, the social relations domain and the environmental domain, plus two aspects for assessing overall QOL and general health.

It provides a multi-dimensional profile of QOL domain and sub-domain scores