Sensitivity to linguistic cues and the use of grammatical gender in Spanish: a study with children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder

This article presents the results of an experimental study on grammatical gender acquisition in Spanish by children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). In an elicitation task, 60 Spanish-speaking children (12 children with DLD, 48 children with typical language (TD) development) had to assign grammatical gender to nonce words which presented different combinations of linguistic cues. The findings show both quantitative and qualitative differences in grammatical gender use between groups of participants, evidencing that children are at different stages of development. Moreover, the results show that DLD children are sensitive to some masculine linguistic cues, as they use masculine gender more precisely when they are provided with more cues. Regarding feminine, although DLD children do not use it significantly better when they have two matching cues, more correct answers are observed in this case.