PhD thesis

This research addresses the acquisition of grammatical gender in Spanish and Russian-speaking children diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Specifically, the aim of this study is to explore whether there are quantitative and qualitative differences in grammatical gender use between DLD children and children with typical language development (TLD). To this end, 111 monolingual children of two typologically different languages, Spanish and Russian, were tested via an elicited production task. Our findings show that, referring to the grammatical gender use, there are significant differences between TLD and DLD children, in both Spanish and Russian. Furthermore, our analysis shows that, generally, the pattern of gender assignment used by Spanish and Russian-speaking children is similar. In conclusion, we suggest that future research extends the sample of DLD participants, especially concerning different age groups. Additionally, it would be convenient to design intervention strategies focused on the reinforcement of grammatical gender assignment and agreement, so they can be used in language and speech therapies.