Dysphasia is a specific disorder of oral language development. It is specific in the sense that it cannot be explained either through a lack of intelligence or a sensorial deficit, through an unfavorable socio economic environment or a significant psycho-emotional disorder, although all of these factors can obviously reinforce the seriousness of the problem.

Dysphasia can take on very diverse forms from one child to the next. It can affect either the expressive side of language primarily, or the receptive and expressive sides of language at the same time.
It must in no case be considered to be a simple language delay in which there is a retardation of the normal phases of language development, where the child's speech corresponds to that of a younger child.

The Tomatis method, associated with orthophonic re-education, can have a very positive action on certain types of dysphasia, those of the expressive type, which are characterised by a quasi normal comprehension and good verbal fluency, but serious difficulties articulating sounds within sentences, which renders the child's speech difficult to comprehend for the family. This type of disorder often implies errors of selection or errors in the positioning of phonemes in the syllable or word (e.g., 'brak' for 'bark', or 'ephelant' for 'elephant').

Most of the time, after re-education of his or her disorders in oral language, the child will be dyslexic, which will require the continuation of a therapeutic procedure through several further sessions of listening re-education