When other’s words become to be mine: Reported speech and pragmatic flexibility in children with typical development and developmental language disorder1

Abstract

The way children use reported speech and thoughts (RS) in narratives has become a topic of growing interest in child language studies. Nonetheless, systematic descriptions of these usages in Spanish speaking children with language disorders can not be found. To fill this gap, we have analyzed how 7 years old children, 25 Typical Development (TD) children and 25 children diagnosed with Developmental Language Delay (DLD), use reported speech and thoughts (RS) in a retelling task. Results show very similar trends in both groups, with slight differences at stories length, their syntactic complexity, and frequency and distribution of RS devices. These results allow to conclude that while TD children tend to use RS devices in a strategic and more flexible way, DLD children of the same age perform in a lower level when they have to use these abilities.