Morphological Difficulties in People with Developmental Language Disorder

Abstract

Background: One of the linguistic features of people with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is found in the use of different types of morphology. People with DLD have serious difficulties in the use of grammatical morphology, and some studies suggest that this factor could constitute a clinical marker of the disorder. The goal of this research was to discover the distinctive characteristics of the different morphological subareas in people with DLD. Methods: The sample consisted of 90 children and adolescents between 6 and 15 years old, of which 47 were diagnosed with DLD and the remaining 43 were in the Typical Development (TD) group. The two groups were matched in chronological age. The assessment instrument used was the morphology scale of the BLOC-C test, which includes 19 different subareas of morphology, among which are inflectional and verbal morphology. Results: The results have shown that people with DLD perform at a lower level than the TD group in all morphology subareas, as well as in the mean and percentile obtained. Conclusions: These data have led us to explore explanations based on several hypotheses and to confirm the research outlining the explicit morphological difficulties in people with DLD.