Deficits in Motor Skills and Upper Limb Proprioception in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often exhibit motor difficulties and impaired somatosensory perception. While limb proprioceptive function is crucial for motor control, upper limb position sense performance in DLD remains unclear. This study investigated motor proficiency and wrist position sense acuity in Mandarin-speaking children with DLD, compared to typically developing (TD) peers.

Twenty-seven children with DLD and 27 age-matched TD children (aged 6-12 years) completed motor and proprioceptive tasks. Motor function was evaluated using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-Second Edition (MABC-2), which assessed three domains: Manual Dexterity, Aiming and Catching, and Balance. Proprioceptive function was evaluated through wrist position sense matching tasks, including ipsilateral and contralateral matching, with performance quantified by position error (PE) and standard deviation of PE (SDPE).

Children with DLD exhibited significantly lower scores across all MABC-2 domains compared to TD peers (p < .001), with 77.8% scoring below the 5th percentile, suggesting comorbidity with developmental coordination disorder. For proprioceptive measures, while no group differences were found in PE, the DLD group exhibited significantly higher SDPE values (p < .05), indicating reduced wrist position sense precision.

Our findings demonstrate that children with DLD exhibit impairments in both motor skills and upper limb proprioceptive acuity. This study extends our understanding of somatosensory deficits in DLD by specifically characterizing wrist proprioceptive function, highlighting the widespread nature of sensorimotor difficulties in this population.