Disentangling the Grammar of 3-to 6-Year-Old Dutch Children With a Developmental Language Disorder

Purpose: Children with a developmental language disorder (DLD) are often delayed in their grammatical development. This is suggested to be the most important characteristic and clinical marker of DLD. However, it is unknown if this assumption is valid for young children, in the earliest stages of grammatical development. For this reason, this study investigates the complexity, diversity, and accuracy of the grammatical repertoires of 3-to 6-year-old Dutch children with DLD, in comparison to that of typically developing (TD) children matched on grammatical level. Method: Language samples of 59 children (29 children with DLD and 30 TD children) were analyzed using multiple measures of grammatical complexity, diversity, and accuracy. The TD children and children with DLD were language-matched on their grammatical development using the levels of the Dutch version of the Language Assessment, Remediation, and Screening Procedure, the Taal Analyse Remediëring en Screening Procedure (TARSP; Schlichting, 2017). Thus, the children with DLD were significantly older than the TD children (respectively DLD age range: 2;7–5;4 [years;months], Mage = 4;1; and TD age range: 2;0–3;9, Mage = 2;9). Results: The results show that children with DLD are comparable to language-matched TD children in their grammatical accuracy and diversity, but that they produce less complex utterances. Conclusions: The results indicate that children with DLD lag behind in their grammatical complexity as compared to language-matched TD children. The results also suggest that grammatical TARSP level is not sufficiently informative for selecting treatment goals. Instead, the results underline the importance of conducting language sample analyses, with special reference to the complexity of the utterances of a child with DLD.