Written Language Production in Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Speech and Language Pathology

Background:

• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) impacts language acquisition and use.
• Cross-linguistic studies are crucial for understanding DLD's universal and language-specific features.
• Greek orthography presents unique challenges for studying written language in DLD.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate written language production in Greek-speaking children with DLD.
• To compare the writing performance of children with DLD to typically developing peers.
• To explore how Greek's orthographic properties influence DLD writing difficulties.

Main Methods:

• Comparative study involving 31 children with DLD and 31 typically developing (TD) children (aged matched).
• Participants produced written texts based on a standardized prompt.
• Analysis included text length, spelling accuracy, word class usage (verbs, nouns, content/function words), lexical diversity, and clause complexity (main/subordinate).

Main Results:

• Children with DLD produced significantly poorer written outputs across most measured aspects compared to TD peers.
• Specific deficits observed in text length, spelling accuracy, and use of diverse vocabulary.
• Children with DLD also showed limitations in grammatical complexity, evidenced by clause usage.

Conclusions:

• Written language difficulties are prominent in Greek-speaking children with DLD.
• Findings underscore the impact of DLD on written expression, irrespective of language-specific orthographic features.
• Results have implications for the assessment and intervention of written language in children with DLD across different linguistic backgrounds.