Syntatic profile of children with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A descriptive analysis

Studies in children with Developmental Language Impairment (DLI known before as Specific Language Impairment) have isolated anomalies affecting varying elements in the grammar of different languages. The importance of these descriptions is that allows a better understanding of the DLI and the linguistic phenomenon. In this framework, the aim of this study was to describe the grammatical deviations in Spanish speaking children with DLI. To achieve this, texts were analyzed from the NIR2004 corpus of 38 children with DLI and 38 children with Typical Development Language (TDL), aged between 5 and 5 years and 11 months, attending preschool. Texts analyses were focused on detecting and classifying grammatical deviations: disagreement, elision, substitution, word disorder, overregularization and addition. Results show that both DLI and TDL children present these grammatical deviations, but the amount of deviations performed by the DLI children is significantly higher for the first five types. These results allowed to initially verify the description of the grammatical features of the DLI as a higher rate of errors, consistent with Leonard’s (2014) proposal.