Written text production in French-speaking children with and without developmental language disorder: Insight into syntactic errors

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) are at risk of literacy impairment, necessitating further exploration of their writing challenges, particularly their syntactic errors, especially in languages other than English, such as French. Our goals were (a) to examine whether French-speaking children with DLD are comparable to their peers without DLD in their productivity, accuracy, and complexity (writing dimensions) and (b) to document syntactic errors occurring in simple and complex sentences produced by the children from these two populations. We compared 27 participants with DLD (Mage = 10;0) to two control groups: one matched on chronological age (CA, n = 27) and one matched on spelling abilities (SA, n = 26; Mage = 8;0). We gave the participants 5 min to write a story, and we analyzed these writing samples for productivity, accuracy, and complexity. We also used a fine-grained analysis to document their syntactic errors. Results indicated that the DLD and SA groups performed similarly on all three writing dimensions, but differed significantly from the CA group. Descriptively, the DLD group exhibited frequent function word omissions, substitutions, and additions and produced many syntagms rather than sentences-a pattern not observed in the other groups. Quantitatively, we noted a delay in writing dimension development in the participants with DLD, but a nuanced understanding of their syntactic challenges, especially in function word usage, emerged descriptively. This highlights the importance of fine-grained analysis for a comprehensive understanding of writing challenges faced by children with DLD.