<p>by Mahmoud Keshavarzi, Georgia Feltham, Susan Richards, Lyla Parvez, Usha Goswami</p> Neural tracking of slow temporal modulations in speech supports extraction of the prosodic and syllabic structure thought to be critical for language acquisition by Temporal Sampling (TS) theory, yet whether these automatic cortical tracking mechanisms are altered in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) remains unclear. We recorded MEG while children with and without DLD listened to a story, and quantified source-level lagged speech-brain coherence and frequency-specific cortical functional connectivity across bilateral cortical regions. As expected <i>a priori</i> by TS theory, children with DLD showed significantly reduced coherence in the 0.9–2.5 Hz range associated with prosodic information in the story, spanning bilateral auditory and speech-related cortex. The strongest regional group differences were in left supramarginal gyrus (<i>p</i> < 0.001) and right inferior frontal gyrus (<i>p</i> = 0.001). In the 2.5–5 Hz range, linked to syllabic-rate modulations in the story, children with DLD showed reduced coherence in right temporal regions (all <i>p</i> < 0.02). Stronger low-frequency speech-brain coherence was associated with better language performance, indicating that individual differences in cortical speech tracking were behaviourally meaningful. No reliable differences were observed at higher modulation rates (5–9 Hz or 12–40 Hz). Exploratory functional connectivity analyses did not reveal network-level group differences that were robust across ROI time-series extraction methods. These findings indicate that atypical low-frequency neural tracking of speech is functionally relevant to language outcomes in DLD.