Production of collocations in children with developmental language disorder

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder that can manifest across different areas of language. According to some linguistic theories, collocations represent a link between the lexicon and grammar, as their correct use requires well-developed abilities in both of these linguistic domains. Given that children with DLD experience difficulties in the grammatical domain, and often also in the lexical domain, the main aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a difference in the number of correctly produced adjective–noun collocations between children diagnosed with DLD and children with typical language development. To further explain these differences, the second aim is to examine whether the groups differ in the number of errors (lexical, morphological, and lexical-morphological) in collocation production. The third aim is to explore the relationship between success in collocation production and the size of receptive vocabulary, as well as grammar comprehension, in children with DLD. This seeks to provide a better understanding of the role of lexical and grammatical knowledge in collocation production, and to clarify the extent to which observed difficulties are related to different language components. An elicitation task, modelled after CONTRIX (Revier, 2009), was used to assess collocation production. The study included 34 children in the third and fourth grades of primary school (17 with DLD and 17 with typical language development). The results showed that children with DLD achieved a statistically significantly lower total number of correct responses on the collocation task compared to their typically developing peers. It was also found that children with DLD made a statistically significantly higher number of lexical errors, while differences in the number of morphological and lexical-morphological errors between the groups were not statistically significant. A statistically significant positive correlation was found between the performance of children with DLD on the collocation task and their results on standardized language ability tests, which is consistent with linguistic theories that assume a relationship between these aspects of language knowledge.