Production of noun suffixes by Turkish-speaking children with developmental language disorder and their typically developing peers.
Selçuk Güven, Laurence B Leonard
PMID 32077208WHAT IT FOUND
Turkish-speaking children with developmental language disorder produced noun suffixes significantly less accurately than their typically developing peers, even though Turkish has many learner-friendly features.
The gap remained wide across all suffix types, showing that language structure alone does not close the deficit.
Key findings
01Children with DLD were less accurate than both age-matched and language-matched typically developing peers on noun suffix production.
02Accuracy dropped significantly when suffixes required morphophonological changes, such as buffer consonants or vowel shifts.
03Errors were most often substitutions of the unmarked nominative form, suggesting children avoided complex suffix details.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study focused only on noun morphology, so it does not address verb or other grammatical areas. Data came from spontaneous speech, which limited the number of obligatory contexts for less frequent suffixes. The typically developing younger group was drawn from archival data without the same rigorous exclusionary testing applied to the other groups.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest or funding sources are mentioned in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that Turkish is an easy language for children with DLD to learn morphology. Despite its regular structure, these children still showed widespread and significant deficits in suffix production compared to their peers.