Abstract
This study contributes to the cross-linguistic investigation of written language difficulties in children with DLD by reporting new findings from Greek-speaking individuals. Specifically, we investigate the writing performance of children with DLD and compare it to that of a group of typically developing (TD) children, matched for gender and chronological age. The specific orthographic properties of Greek, radically different from those of English, offer a unique opportunity to understand the nature of written language production in DLD. The participants of the study were 62 children, 31 with DLD and 31 TD. Both groups were asked to write a text on a special prompt they were given by the researcher and they were assessed in the total number of words used in text, in the proportion of incorrectly spelt words in text as well as in the use of verbs, nouns, content and function words. Also, the different words and the total number of main and subordinate clauses each of the participants used in their text were counted. The findings of the study showed that the written outputs of the DLD group were poorer in almost all measurements compared to those of their TD peers. We discuss our findings in relation to those reported by other languages, in particular English, and spell out the implications for assessing written language in children with DLD.
Highlights
Previous research has proven that about 7.4% of the population has significant language deficits (8% boys and 6% girls; Tomblin et al, 1997; Norbury et al, 2016) which cannot be attributed to any obvious etiology, such as hearing loss, low non-verbal intelligence, or any neurological disorder (Haebig et al, 2016; Montgomery et al, 2016)
Our aim was to compare the written performance between the two groups and it was expected that the written texts of the Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) group would be shorter, with poor word diversity and more errors compared to the typically developing (TD) group
The results of this study indicate that DLD students performed poorer in most of our measurements compared to their TD peers
Summary
Previous research has proven that about 7.4% of the population has significant language deficits (8% boys and 6% girls; Tomblin et al, 1997; Norbury et al, 2016) which cannot be attributed to any obvious etiology, such as hearing loss, low non-verbal intelligence, or any neurological disorder (Haebig et al, 2016; Montgomery et al, 2016). The population presenting those characteristics is classified as having Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). DLD may co-exist with other neurodevelopmental disorders and an individual should not be banned from
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
