Abstract
It is well known that language development can be delayed due to hearing impairment, intellectual developmental disorder, neurodevelopmental disorders, and developmental language disorder. In contrast, with recent social changes, such as the growing trend of early English-language childcare and an increase in foreign parents living in Japan, cases of language development delays due to insufficient acquisition of the native language in multilingual environments during early childhood have been observed. Due to these changes in social structure, it is expected that such cases will increase in the future. Otolaryngologists have the opportunity to detect language abnormalities through health checkups and other screenings. The purpose of presenting our case reports is to raise awareness of assessing upbringing history and conducting appropriate evaluations of the cases suspected of language development delays. Case 1 is a 5-year-old child who had lived in the United States with Japanese parents for 4 years from the age of 1 and returned to Japan. Before entering primary school, he had insufficient understanding of Japanese words and language development delay with syntactic difficulties. Case 2 is a 2-year-10-month-old child who lived with a working Japanese father and a working Filipino mother. She has no first words due to delayed acquisition of the native language.
