Estimating the prevalence of delay in comprehensive and expressive language development in preschool children in Pichincha, Ecuador based on Plithogenic Statistics

Language is defined as the exclusive capacity of human beings to communicate through a set of arbitrary linguistic codes materialized in speech, thanks to which cognitive, executive, social, and academic, among other skills are acquired. In the first three years of life, the child goes through the so-called critical period of language acquisition. In this period, the child develops the cognitive, neuromotor, and sensory skills necessary to generate the communicative bases, including intentionality to communicate turns of intervention, encoding, decoding, and interpretation of the message. If something happens at this stage, linguistic development could be severely compromised. This paper aims to carry out a statistical study on the prevalence of language disorders in children between one and three years of age in the Ecuadorian province of Pichincha, in 2024. Language disorders can affect both comprehensive and expressive language and are multicausal. That is why we apply Plithogenic Statistics in the study. Plithogenic Statistics extends Multivariate Statistics where, in addition to randomness, indeterminacy is included. This is the theory we selected to carry out the study because there are indeterminacies and multiple variables in the problem.