Linguistic disfluencies in Russian-speaking typically and atypically developing children: individual variability in different contexts.

Disfluency in children and adults seems to occur like errors of speech but, at the same time, is an essential feature of spontaneous (unprepared) speech. The present study aimed to evaluate linguistic disfluencies in typically and atypically developing Russian-speaking children from the perspective of the dynamic adaptive model of self-monitoring in speech production. The study collected four language samples from 10 six-year-old children with developmental language disorder and 14 typically developing peers: two storytelling tasks, structured conversation, and a play argument. After transcribing audio-recordings and marking linguistic disfluencies, the authors conducted structured distributional analysis. The distribution of several indexes of disfluency was estimated to assess the prevalence and profiles of different (sub)types of disfluencies. The disfluency rate statistics were similar between the typically developing children and children with developmental language disorder. The distributional indexes score showed that tasks significantly impacted the rate of different (sub)types of disfluencies. Task-related patterns in a set of the distributional indexes significantly distinguished the groups. Thus, changes in the disfluency profile related to different external factors, as a sign of a flexibility of an adaptive self-monitoring system, may be limited in children with developmental language disorder.

Lexical and Grammatical Errors in Developmentally Language Disordered and Typically Developed Children: The Impact of Age and Discourse Genre.

Persistent lexical and grammatical errors in children's speech are usually recognized as the main evidence of language delay or language disorder. These errors are usually treated as a sign of a deficit in language competence. On the other hand, some studies have revealed the same kinds of grammatical errors in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in typically developed (TD) children. Quite often, DLD children use grammatical markers properly, but sometimes they do this erroneously. It has been suggested that the main area of the limitations in DLD children is language performance but not language competence. From the perspective of the resource deficit model, the error rate in DLD children should be influenced by the cognitive demands of utterance and text production. We presume that different genres of discourse demand a different number of cognitive resources and, thus, should differently impact the error rate in children's speech production. To test our hypothesis, we carried out an error analysis of two corpora of child discourse. The first corpus contained longitudinal data of discourse (personal narratives, fictional stories, chats, and discussions) collected from 12 children at four age points (4 years 3 months., 4 years 8 months., 5 years 3 months., and 5 years 9 months. years). Another corpus contained discourse texts (fictional stories and discussions) collected in the framework of a cross-sectional study from 6-year-old TD and DLD children; the DLD children had language expression but not comprehension difficulties. A comparative analysis between different discourse genres evidenced that the genre of discourse and age of assessment impacted the error distribution in the DLD and TD children. Such variables as the lexical and morphological error rates were impacted the most significantly. The results of the two studies confirmed our hypothesis regarding the probabilistic nature of lexical and grammatical errors in both DLD and TD children and the relationship between a cognitive loading of the genre and the error rate.