Writing Skills of Individuals With Developmental Language Disorder (DLD)

Abstract

Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a neurodevelopmental language disorder that causes a delay in language development and deficits in all domains of language. The bulk of research up to now has focused mainly on the oral language of the DLD population; however ,written language is also impaired in DLD and remains an under researched field thus far. The aim of the chapter is to present research findings regarding the acquisition of writing skills of the DLD population and report the specific difficulties this population faces in written language production. More specifically, the chapter focuses on the type of errors observed in the written language production of individuals with DLD in different kinds of tasks. Also, the vocabulary used and the spelling and grammar errors as well as the quality of their written texts are further discussed. In addition, the errors observed while producing a narrative on a specific prompt or while writing down dictated words are presented separately.