Written verb use and diversity in children with Developmental Language Disorder: stepping stones to academic writing

Abstract

for their data collection efforts.

Written Language Production in Children With Developmental Language Disorder

“…Our finding is also in line with the Connelly et al (2012) study, which revealed that the DLD group produced fewer words in their writing tasks compared to their TD peers. Furthermore, our results confirm the finding of Stuart et al (2020) in terms of the total number of words produced by the participants, while writing a text on a specific prompt and, also, are in line with Ralli et al (2021) who carried out their study in Greek. Ralli et al (2021) concluded that the DLD group performed worse than their TD peers of a corresponding chronological age in writing productivity measures as they wrote fewer words in their texts as compared to the TD group.…”

“…Several researchers studied the total production of words of children with DLD while writing, using different control groups in order to identify if there was a significant difference among them or not. Mackie and Dockrell (2004) and Stuart et al (2020) agreed via their studies that DLD group produced fewer words in their written texts than TD children of a corresponding chronological age but not than those of a corresponding linguistic age. Dockrell et al (2007) concluded the same in their study in which only children with DLD participated and measurements were repeated twice within a gap of 2 years.…”

“…Children with DLD also experience attention and reading difficulties, they find it difficult to understand both complex and simple sentence structures ( Montgomery et al, 2016 ) and they have difficulties in understanding texts while reading ( Talli et al, 2016 ). Moreover, children with DLD produce fewer verbs while writing as compared to their typically developing (TD) peers ( Stuart et al, 2020 ). The deficits they face are at a morphological, semantic, and pragmatic level while the phonological processes this population uses are similar to those of typically developing younger children ( Leonard, 2014 ).…”

“…In addition, lexical diversity was measured in several studies ( Machie et al, 2013 ; Williams et al, 2013 ; Stuart et al, 2020 ) revealing that the DLD group used a limited number of different words in their written texts. Williams et al (2013) found that the DLD group used a significantly less diverse range of words than their TD peers of a corresponding chronological age.…”

Crosslinguistic transfer of higher order cognitive skills and their roles in writing for English-Spanish dual language learners.

“…This writing-by-language hypothesis would be supported if language proficiency largely determines writing quality and if there is a large gap in L1 and L2 language proficiency. Oral language skills are necessary for translating ideas and thoughts into language (Kim et al, 2011, 2014, 2015; Olinghouse, 2008; Olinghouse & Leaird, 2009; Silverman et al 2015; Stuart et al, 2020), and oral language skills are component skills that contribute to writing in DIEW (Kim, 2020; Kim & Graham, 2021; Kim & Park, 2019). Thus, lack of language proficiency will act as a bottle neck in the writing process and consequently in writing quality, and a large discrepancy in language proficiency between L1 and L2 will result in large differences in writing quality between L1 and L2.…”