Speech profiles of Spanish-Catalan children with developmental language disorder

ABSTRACT

Children with developmental language disorders (DLD) are especially characterised by morphosyntactic difficulties. Nevertheless, previous studies have also shown that children with DLD have phonological difficulties. This paper aims to describe the productive and perceptive phonological speech profile of Spanish-Catalan children with DLD at the age of six in order to characterise the underlying nature of their difficulties. Fourteen Spanish-Catalan six-year-old children with DLD and 14 control children without language difficulties who attended the same class were assessed with the screening and discrimination tasks of the A-RE-HA: Análisis del Retraso del Habla (Speech Delay Analysis – Catalan and Spanish version). We analysed the production of words, syllables and phonemes, phoneme discrimination and phonological simplification processes used by these children. The results showed that children with DLD have a lower percentile in correct word structures, syllabic structures and phonemes, and have more difficulty discriminating phonemes. Detailed analyses revealed more difficulties with the most complex word and syllabic templates, and with almost all phonemes. Furthermore, children with DLD applied more phonological simplification processes than the control group. An individual analysis showed that only ten of the children with DLD also had a speech delay (percentile < 25), while four had scores in line with their age. These results show that most of the six-year-old children with DLD maintain speech difficulties, which are mainly phonological and not (or not only) articulatory. Therefore, individual differences with respect to speech delay in DLD must be taken into consideration to better detect these children.

KEYWORDS:

• Developmental language disorder
• specific language impairment
• speech delay
• speech profile
• perceptive discrimination

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to all the children, families and schools who participated in the study.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest with the research described in this research article.

Additional information

Funding

The Spanish government (MINECO/AEI) and the ERDF, EU (European Regional Development Fund) supported this work: Ministerio de Ciencia e innovación [SEJ2006-12616], Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad [EDU2013-45174-P] and Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad [EDU2017-85909-P], alongside a fellowship awarded to the third author of the study from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness [BES-2014-069063].