Written narratives of adolescents with developmental language disorder compared with typically developing adolescents
and adults
Children who struggle with acquisition of oral language are likely to become less proficient writers later on. The
current study aimed to compare written texts of adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typically
developing (TD) peers in terms of length, content, cohesion, coherence and errors. Additionally, texts of TD adolescents were
compared with the texts of TD adults. Accordingly, three participant groups were included in this study: 21 DLD adolescents, 21 TD
adolescents and 22 TD adults, all native speakers of Croatian. The comparison of narrative texts written by DLD and TD adolescents
suggests that the former write shorter and less cohesive texts and produce more errors. These results indicate that individuals
with DLD have writing profiles similar to those obtained in other studies. Comparison of texts written by TD adolescents and
adults shows that both groups write largely similar texts which differ only in the use of sophisticated vocabulary.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1Features of the Croatian language and orthography
- 1.2Language characteristics of texts written by adolescents with DLD
- 1.3Production of coherent text by DLD children and adolescents
- 1.4Present study
- 2.Method
- 2.1Participants, materials and procedures
- 2.2About narrative-writing task
- 2.3Measures and scoring
- Content and coherence
- Text length, cohesion and errors
- 2.4Data analyses
- 3.Results
- 3.1Descriptive statistics
- 3.2Between-group differences
- DLD adolescents vs. TD adolescents
- TD adolescents vs. TD adults
- 4.Discussion
- DLD adolescents vs. TD adolescents
- TD adolescents vs. TD adults
- 5.Conclusion
- Conflicts of interest
-
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