The role of vocabulary and grammar in the listening text comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder

The current study examined the role of vocabulary and grammar in the listening comprehension of school-age Cantonese-speaking children with developmental language disorder in Hong Kong. Participants were 692 typically developing children (TD) and 53 children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and they were tested with a standardized test of oral Cantonese, which includes measures on listening comprehension, receptive and expressive grammar, expressive vocabulary, word definition and lexical relations. The results from multiple regression analysis revealed that listening comprehension of the TD group was explained by receptive grammar, expressive vocabulary, and lexical relationships. However, children of the DLD group mainly relied on a subset of their vocabulary knowledge, as measured in a lexical relation task on antonym, in understanding the text under the constraint of a limited grammatical knowledge.