Online Comprehension of Verbal Number Morphology in Children With Developmental Language Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Study

Abstract

Purpose: Previous studies have raised the possibility of preserved language comprehension in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in online tasks and within simple sentence structures. Consequently, we evaluated the capacity of children with DLD to comprehend verbal number agreement in simple sentence structures (i.e., verb–object–subject and verb–subject). Method: Using an eye-tracking methodology, we conducted two psycholinguistic experiments with 96 Spanish- and Catalan-speaking participants. The sample was distributed into four groups: 24 children with DLD (age range: 4;6–12;6 [years;months]; average age = 7;8 [years;months]), 24 children with the same chronological age (4;6–12;2, 7;8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (4;6–9;4, 6;8), and 24 university students as language experts (18–30, 22;5). Results: The experimental data indicate that children with DLD can comprehend verbal number agreement at least under the present experimental conditions. Conclusion: The empirical outcomes suggest that number morphology comprehension by children with DLD might be more typical than what it is generally considered to be.