Inferential language use in the oral narratives of adolescents with and without developmental language disorder

Inferential language is an essential aspect of narrative storytelling. It offers not only details about events such as cause and effect and character cognition (e.g. intentions, actions, and reactions) but other evaluative and descriptive language. Previous studies have shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD, previously also termed as Specific Language Impairment, SLI) exhibit weakness in narrative development, and such weakness is suggested to be unlikely to be resolved over time. However, studies that have focused on the inferential language use in narratives of adolescents with DLD are almost non-existent, and it is unclear whether inferential language use by adolescents with DLD would remain problematic or achieve close-to-normal performance. To address this issue, we compared the use of inferential language in the oral narratives 19 adolescents with DLD (Mean age = 14.3; SD = 0.64) and 19 adolescents with typical language development (TLD; Mean age = 14.0; SD = 0.50). Each transcribed narrative was coded for inferences across character actions/attempts, internal states, causality, character dialogue and other inferences. Results indicated that the two groups performed similarly in all measures except for assigning possessive expressions. Our results suggest that adolescents with DLD may approximate their typical language development (TLD) peers in terms of the inferential language use in oral narratives.