Implicit Representation of Grammatical Gender in Italian Children with Developmental Language Disorder: An Exploratory Study on Phonological and/or Syntactic Sensitivity

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) display impaired phonological and/or morpho-syntactic skills. To detect these impairments, it would be of value to devise tasks that assess specific markers of implicit linguistic competence. We administered a forced choice semantic categorization task developed in Italian (Belacchi and Cubelli in Journal of psycholinguistic research 41:295–310, 2012) for detecting the implicit use of grammatical gender markers in classifying epicenes names of animals: phonological and/or syntactic. Seventy Italian children with expressive-phonological DLD (mean age: 61.20 months) were compared with a same-size control group. Overall, the children with DLD performed more poorly than the control group. Also, the DLD participants used the phonological index to a significantly lesser extent, confirming their specific impairment in the phonological processing of words. The current study provided evidence for the status of phonological discrimination skills as a precursor of language development, and the value of using categorization tasks to assess implicit linguistic competence in children with DLD.