Impaired use of function words in European French-speaking children with developmental language disorder.

ABSTRACT: Function word (FW) is a reliable marker of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), yet their profile in European French (EF) preschoolers remains poorly understood. This corpus study compared FW use in 73 monolingual EF-speaking children with DLD (39-84 months, M = 54, SD = 10.93) and 76 typically developing peers (24-36 months, M = 30, SD = 5.97) matched on mean length of utterance in words (M = 2.5). Six FW categories-articles, prepositions, demonstrative pronouns, subject pronouns, and modal and auxiliary verbs-were analysed using chi-square tests and log-linear regression. Performance was comparable for articles and prepositions, but children with DLD showed impairments of FW use related to verbal contexts-reduced pronoun use, skewed FW distribution, and frequent omission or agreement e

SUBMITTER: Le Normand MT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12663262 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature