Alalia is traditionally defined in the Eastern European logopedic literature as a severe underdevelopment of speech arising from early organic lesions of cortical speech systems, and it is broadly differentiated into motor (expressive) and sensory (receptive) forms, with mixed variants frequently observed. Although international nosology increasingly uses categories such as developmental language disorder or childhood apraxia of speech, the construct of alalia remains clinically and pedagogically useful for understanding the multilayered psycholinguistic mechanisms that constrain language acquisition. This article synthesizes classic neuropsychological insights with contemporary psycholinguistic evidence to delineate the perceptual, cognitive, and motor substrates that shape the linguistic profile of children with alalia and to explain how these substrates impair face-to-face interaction, discourse organization, and the pragmatic regulation of conversation. A narrative review approach is adopted to integrate findings on phonemic perception, temporal auditory processing, phonological working memory, articulatory praxis, lexical access, morphosyntactic planning, prosody, and pragmatic inferencing. The analysis shows that children with motor alalia tend to exhibit deficits in articulatory programming and sequential speech organization against a background of relatively better auditory discrimination, whereas children with sensory alalia show pronounced phonemic hearing and lexical-semantic mapping difficulties with comparatively fluent but semantically unstable output; in practice, overlapping symptom complexes are common.  

Alalia, motor alalia, sensory alalia

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