Vietnamese children with and without DLD: Classifier use and grammaticality over time

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Developmental Psychology
• Clinical Linguistics

Background:

• Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) identification relies on clinical markers.
• Vietnamese language-specific markers for DLD are underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify potential clinical markers for DLD in Vietnamese.
• To analyze longitudinal language development in Vietnamese children with and without DLD.

Main Methods:

• Longitudinal study of 20 children (10 DLD, 10 typical development) across three time points.
• Analysis of story generation tasks using Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Proportion of Grammatical Utterances (PGU).
• Examination of Vietnamese classifiers for accuracy, diversity, and productivity.

Main Results:

• Children with DLD exhibited lower MLU and PGU over time compared to typical development peers.
• Classifier diversity was lower in the DLD group, though omission errors decreased for both groups.
• DLD group showed increased classifier productivity over time but remained less productive than typical peers.

Conclusions:

• Vietnamese children with DLD demonstrate grammatical and structural language differences.
• Classifier usage patterns, specifically diversity and productivity, show promise as clinical markers for DLD in Vietnamese.
• Findings contribute to the development of diagnostic tools for DLD in Vietnamese-speaking populations.