Microstructure competences and grammatical errors of Danish-speaking children with developmental language disorder when telling and retelling narratives and engaging in spontaneous language.
Lone Sundahl Olsen, Kristine Jensen de López
PMID 39552141WHAT IT FOUND
Danish children with developmental language disorder made significantly more errors than age-matched peers in structured narratives, but not in spontaneous speech.
They showed specific difficulties with word order and omissions, not just morphology. Structured tasks are needed to identify these issues.
Key findings
01Children with DLD produced significantly more grammatical errors than age-matched peers in narrative tasks, with 21% of their utterances containing errors compared to 10% for controls.
02While morphology errors were frequent in all groups, word order and omission errors were significantly more frequent in the DLD group than in both age-matched and language-matched control groups.
03Task type affected error detection: DLD children showed significantly more errors than peers in structured narrative tasks (Frog, Fox, Bus) but not in spontaneous language samples.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Small sample size (15 children with DLD), limiting generalisability. Three children were excluded for producing fewer than 100 utterances, which may bias the sample towards more verbose children. The spontaneous language task was semi-structured (drawing-based), which may still have imposed some constraints not present in fully naturalistic conversation. Results are specific to Danish, a language with verb-second word order, and may not generalise to languages with different syntactic structures.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest were declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that spontaneous language samples are sufficient for diagnosing DLD in Danish-speaking children. This study found no significant difference in error rates between children with DLD and their peers in spontaneous speech, suggesting that structured narrative tasks are necessary to reveal grammatical weaknesses.