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Article published In: Written Language & Literacy
Vol. 25:2 (2022) ► pp.204–227

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Written narratives of adolescents with developmental language disorder compared with typically developing adolescents and adults

 | University of Zagreb
 | University of Zagreb
 | University of Zagreb
Published online: 6 December 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.00067.kra
Abstract
Children who struggle with acquisition of oral language are likely to become less proficient writers later on. The current study aimed to compare written texts of adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) and their typically developing (TD) peers in terms of length, content, cohesion, coherence and errors. Additionally, texts of TD adolescents were compared with the texts of TD adults. Accordingly, three participant groups were included in this study: 21 DLD adolescents, 21 TD adolescents and 22 TD adults, all native speakers of Croatian. The comparison of narrative texts written by DLD and TD adolescents suggests that the former write shorter and less cohesive texts and produce more errors. These results indicate that individuals with DLD have writing profiles similar to those obtained in other studies. Comparison of texts written by TD adolescents and adults shows that both groups write largely similar texts which differ only in the use of sophisticated vocabulary.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Features of the Croatian language and orthography
    • 1.2Language characteristics of texts written by adolescents with DLD
    • 1.3Production of coherent text by DLD children and adolescents
    • 1.4Present study
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants, materials and procedures
    • 2.2About narrative-writing task
    • 2.3Measures and scoring
      • Content and coherence
      • Text length, cohesion and errors
    • 2.4Data analyses
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Descriptive statistics
    • 3.2Between-group differences
      • DLD adolescents vs. TD adolescents
      • TD adolescents vs. TD adults
  • 4.Discussion
    • DLD adolescents vs. TD adolescents
    • TD adolescents vs. TD adults
  • 5.Conclusion
    • Study limitations
  • Conflicts of interest
  • References
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