A team of researchers from the Neurodevelop eHealth Lab at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya's eHealth Center has shown that children who speak a language with transparent spelling, such as Spanish, and who have developmental language disorder (DLD), have difficulties in most linguistic areas when it comes to producing written texts.
"Exploring Spanish writing abilities of children with developmental language disorder in expository texts " is a groundbreaking study, the first to address this issue in a language such as Spanish, as previous research has only focused on children whose first language is English. Unlike Spanish, English is an orthographically "opaque" language, meaning that the relationship between sound and spelling is complex, with different letters representing the same sound and vice versa.
Professor Llorenç Andreu, principal investigator at the Neurodevelop eHealth Lab and member of the UOC's Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, explained that "this language difference suggests that Spanish-speaking children with DLD should make fewer mistakes when writing than children who speak English. However, the results of the study show that children with DLD who speak a language with transparent spelling, such as Spanish, have the same difficulties when writing".
Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a severe and persistent disorder in the acquisition and development of oral language that is not associated with any pathology and that may affect one or more components of language to varying degrees, not only in children's efforts to express ideas but also in the area of receptive language (comprehension). This disorder often affects children's social and educational development.
According to Raquel Balboa, researcher at the Neurodevelop eHealth Lab and co-author of the study, "many school activities use written language, which is a serious limitation for children with DLD. We believe that the findings of our study should be taken into account when schools are planning and implementing writing activities with these children, as it is an area where they have many difficulties".
“Developmental language disorder (DLD) is a severe and persistent disorder in the acquisition and development of oral language that is not associated with any pathology and that may affect one or more components of language to varying degrees”
Artificial Intelligence to analyse writing
The study analysed compositions written by 26 children with DLD and 26 children with typical language development, with an average age of ten and a half. They all wrote an essay about their favourite animal. The texts were transcribed using Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) and then analysed using Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) as part of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) project, which aims to study children's language acquisition. "These software programs allow us to code all types of errors and quantify them quickly and effectively," Andreu explained.
The analysis showed that children with DLD omitted more content words (nouns, adjectives and verbs), made more mistakes with functional words (determiners, prepositions, adverbs, etc.), verb conjugation and inflectional morphemes, and made a large number of spelling errors. They also wrote fewer words and sentences, and their texts were simpler in structure and vocabulary than those of the children in the other group.
Nadia Ahufinger, a member of the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences and co-author of the study, said: "The research has shown that the type of mistakes children with DLD make in written texts are similar to those they make when speaking. They have difficulties with verbal morphology (e.g. they say and write 'no me gusta las abejas' instead of 'no me gustan las abejas'), with the use of functional words such as prepositions (e.g. 'pueden oír distancia' instead of 'pueden oír a distancia') and with pronouns (e.g. 'mi raza de mi perro' instead of 'la raza de mi perro')."
Ahufinger believes that further studies are now needed to assess whether these difficulties also exist when children write other types of text, and to identify the best way to support children with DLD in writing: "The introduction of small writing tasks in the evaluation of these children would help us to better understand their profile and design measures that are more in line with their needs," she said.
New study by the Neurodevelop eHealth Lab for Catalan-speaking children with DLD
The team of researchers at the Neurodevelop eHealth Lab has published another notable study in the field of developmental language disorder (DLD): "Grammatical correction and morphological productivity tasks as potential identifiers of developmental language disorder in Spanish-Catalan bilingual children: a pilot study", which lays the foundations for designing tools to help identify DLD in children whose first language is Catalan. The authors propose two tasks that can differentiate whether a child has DLD using a grammatical correction tool (GramCorr) and a morphological productivity tool (MP), which they believe have the potential to accurately diagnose DLD in these children.