Lexical and Grammatical Errors in Developmentally Language Disordered and Typically Developed Children: The Impact of Age and Discourse Genre.

Aleksandr N Kornev,Ingrida Balčiūnienė

doi:10.3390/children8121114

Abstract

Persistent lexical and grammatical errors in children’s speech are usually recognized as the main evidence of language delay or language disorder. These errors are usually treated as a sign of a deficit in language competence. On the other hand, some studies have revealed the same kinds of grammatical errors in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in typically developed (TD) children. Quite often, DLD children use grammatical markers properly, but sometimes they do this erroneously. It has been suggested that the main area of the limitations in DLD children is language performance but not language competence. From the perspective of the resource deficit model, the error rate in DLD children should be influenced by the cognitive demands of utterance and text production. We presume that different genres of discourse demand a different number of cognitive resources and, thus, should differently impact the error rate in children’s speech production. To test our hypothesis, we carried out an error analysis of two corpora of child discourse. The first corpus contained longitudinal data of discourse (personal narratives, fictional stories, chats, and discussions) collected from 12 children at four age points (4 years 3 months., 4 years 8 months., 5 years 3 months., and 5 years 9 months. years). Another corpus contained discourse texts (fictional stories and discussions) collected in the framework of a cross-sectional study from 6-year-old TD and DLD children; the DLD children had language expression but not comprehension difficulties. A comparative analysis between different discourse genres evidenced that the genre of discourse and age of assessment impacted the error distribution in the DLD and TD children. Such variables as the lexical and morphological error rates were impacted the most significantly. The results of the two studies confirmed our hypothesis regarding the probabilistic nature of lexical and grammatical errors in both DLD and TD children and the relationship between a cognitive loading of the genre and the error rate.

Highlights

Language development is considered an essential part of mental development
Comparative estimation of different types of errors revealed that the developmental language disorder (DLD) children made significantly more lexical errors per word (F = 4.530; p = 0.037) and almost significantly more syntactic errors (F = 3.719; p = 0.058)
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Summary

Introduction

Language development is considered an essential part of mental development. Language is one of the main components of verbal reasoning as well as communicative and social interaction skills. ‘To become a native speaker’ means to learn the mother tongue, i.e., to acquire numerous language units and multiple rules and combine them for producing utterances following appropriate standards of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar. During this time, a child accumulates and elaborates a rich complex of declarative and procedural knowledge. According to a comprehensive longitudinal study based on the natural observation of native Russian language acquisition [10], until the 7th year of life, typically developed (TD) children sometimes make grammatical or lexical errors. Besides incorrect declension forms, occasional omissions of functional words and production of neologisms may be observed

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