a systematic review on diagnostic procedures for specific language impairment: the sensitivity and specificity issues

background: identification of children with specific language impairment (sli) has been viewed as both necessity and challenge. investigators and clinicians use different tests and measures for this purpose. some of these tests/measures have good psychometric properties, but it is not sufficient for diagnostic purposes. a diagnostic procedure can be used for identification a specific population with confidence only when its sensitivity and specificity are acceptable. in this study, we  searched for tests/measures with predefined sensitivity and specificity for identification of preschool children with sli from their typically developing peers.materials and methods: a computerized search in bibliographic databases from 2000 to august 2015 was performed with the following