Description

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), also known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI), is a language impairment that has long-term impacts on a child’s social and academic development (Bishop et al., 2017). Similar to a prevalence rate found globally, Pham et al. (2019) reported that 7% of kindergarten children in Vietnam were at risk for DLD. Children with DLD show particular difficulty with acquiring grammatical features. A distinct grammatical feature of Vietnamese is classifiers. Classifiers are words that precede a noun and provide additional information about its countability, definiteness, and category (e.g. animate and inanimate) (Hao, 1988; Phan & Lam, 2021). Classifier omission was found to be one of the most common errors among Vietnamese kindergarteners, (Pham et al., 2019). Understanding how children with and without DLD use classifiers, and whether their errors persist over time, is useful for characterizing the disorder in Vietnamese. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the use of classifiers of 12 Vietnamese children, 6 with DLD and 6 without DLD, matched by age and gender. Children participated in a storytelling task, using a wordless picture book (Mayer, 1967), in three consecutive years (kindergarten, first, and second grade) for a total of 36 samples (3 per child). Their language samples were audio recorded and transcribed using SALT software. A linguistic analysis was conducted to compare and contrast classifier use between the typically developing children and children with DLD, and across the three time points. Classifier use was measured in terms of accuracy (classifier omission errors), diversity (number of different classifiers produced), and productivity (number of different syntactic constructions with classifiers). Preliminary analysis suggests that children with DLD show reduced classifier diversity and productivity but then catch up to their typical peers by second grade. There might also be potential group differences between how classifiers are used with the main characters of the story versus peripheral object nouns. Ongoing analysis will confirm whether these patterns are robust across participants. Findings will contribute to a broader understanding of Vietnamese language development and potential indicators of a language disorder.