Insights from real-time comprehension of Spanish verbal tense in children with developmental language disorder: An eye-tracking study

Abstract

The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish- and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (Mage 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (Mage 7.8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (Mage 6.8 years), and 24 adults (Mage 22.5 years). Empirical data revealed that children with DLD can comprehend verbal tense, at least in the present experimental conditions. Based on the empirical results and despite some minor differences between the DLD group and the chronological control group, we suggest that tense morphology comprehension in DLD might be more typical than what is generally considered. Additionally, we propose that verbal comprehension difficulties in children with DLD might be less related to the lack of understanding of specific morphological markers, and more to an accumulation of difficulty which leads to a linguistic processing slowdown.