Written narratives of adolescents with developmental language disorder compared with typically developing adolescents and adults

Abstract

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.