Who's Next? Turn Anticipation in Dutch Preschoolers With and Without Developmental Language Disorder

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) sometimes experience difficulties with turn-taking. Smooth turn-taking requires efficient use of linguistic information in real-time interaction. Children as young as 2 years of age already use linguistic cues to predict upcoming conversational structure; for example, they anticipate more speaker switches following questions than nonquestions (question advantage), especially questions with the second-person pronoun ("you") than questions with the first-person pronoun ("I"; pronoun advantage). We investigated whether children with DLD were less efficient than their typically developing (TD) peers in using these linguistic cues to predict conversational structure in real time.

We tracked the gaze of 23 three-year-olds with DLD and 23 TD peers while they watched two characters in conversation. We compared the size and timing of the question advantage and the pronoun advantage in both groups of children.

We find no evidence that the sizes of the question advantage and pronoun advantage differed between children with DLD and their TD peers. However, the timing of their anticipatory looks to the addressee differed; TD children already looked more at the addressee for questions than nonquestions while the speaker was still talking, while children with DLD began looking more at the addressee after the speaker finished their turn. In their use of the pronoun cue, both groups of children already looked more at the addressee while the speaker was still talking.

Three-year-olds with and without DLD thus use linguistic cues to predict conversational structure in real time. The outcomes suggest, however, that children with DLD may be slower in their predictions. This slower processing may contribute to the turn-taking difficulties sometimes observed in children with DLD.