Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder with adverse impacts that continue into adulthood. However, its neural bases remain unclear. Here we address this gap by systematically identifying and quantitatively synthesizing neuroanatomical studies of DLD using co-localization likelihood estimation, a recently developed neuroanatomical meta-analytic technique. Analyses of structural brain data (22 peer-reviewed papers, 577 participants) revealed highly consistent anomalies only in the basal ganglia (100% of participant groups in which this structure was examined, weighted by group sample sizes; 99.8% permutation-based likelihood the anomaly clustering was not due to chance). These anomalies were localized specifically to the anterior neostriatum (again 100% weighted proportion and 99.8% likelihood). As expected given the task dependence of activation, functional neuroimaging data (11 peer-reviewed papers, 414 participants) yielded less consistency, though anomalies again occurred primarily in the basal ganglia (79.0% and 95.1%). Multiple sensitivity analyses indicated that the patterns were robust. The meta-analyses elucidate the neuroanatomical signature of DLD, and implicate the basal ganglia in particular. The findings support the procedural circuit deficit hypothesis of DLD, have basic research and translational implications for the disorder, and advance our understanding of the neuroanatomy of language.

发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 是一种常见的神经发育障碍，其不良影响会持续到成年期。然而，其神经基础仍不清楚。在这里，我们通过使用共定位可能性估计（一种最近开发的神经解剖学荟萃分析技术）系统地识别和定量综合 DLD 的神经解剖学研究来解决这一差距。对大脑结构数据的分析（22 篇同行评审论文，577 名参与者）显示仅在基底神经节中存在高度一致的异常（检查该结构的参与者组的 100%，按组样本大小加权；基于排列的可能性为 99.8%）异常聚类并非偶然）。这些异常具体定位于前新纹状体（同样是 100% 加权比例和 99.8% 可能性）。正如预期的那样，考虑到激活的任务依赖性，功能神经影像数据（11 篇同行评审论文，414 名参与者）的一致性较差，尽管异常再次主要发生在基底神经节（79.0% 和 95.1%）。多重敏感性分析表明这些模式是稳健的。荟萃分析阐明了 DLD 的神经解剖学特征，尤其涉及基底神经节。这些发现支持了 DLD 的程序性回路缺陷假说，对该疾病具有基础研究和转化意义，并增进了我们对语言神经解剖学的理解。