Effects of Developmental Language Disorder on Writing for College-Aged Adults

Purpose: Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects individuals through childhood into adulthood. However, we do not know how this disorder affects the written language abilities of college students, for whom writing difficulties may cause significant academic issues. This study sought to explore and characterize the differences in writing ability, planning strategies for writing, and revision tendencies of college students with and without DLD. We also sought to determine whether meaningful differences exist in the types of information gained from handwritten and typed writing samples. Method: Fifty college-enrolled young adults between the ages of 18 – 22 were recruited and divided in to two equal groups (25 with DLD, 25 with typical language). Each completed two writing prompts (one by hand and one on the computer) and a survey of their writing habits. Their writing samples were analyzed for length, complexity, and the presence of errors at the word and sentence levels. Video recordings of their typing and photos of their handwriting were analyzed for their revision tendencies. Responses to the survey were analyzed for group differences in use of planning strategies. Results: Expository samples written by college students with DLD are likely to have fewer words and more syntactic errors than the samples written by their peers with typical language. College students with and without DLD are likely to write samples with the same levels of syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and word-level errors. Typing is conducive to longer samples for college students with and without DLD. There are no major differences in the strategies college students with and without DLD report using for planning for writing assignments. There is no relationship between number of on-line revisions and total number of errors for college students with DLD. Conclusions: The lack of practically significant group differences between college students with and without DLD in terms of writing quality and complexity highlights the importance of individual strengths-and-needs-based assessment and intervention for this population. Typing is a highly practical and functional manner of measuring writing ability for college students with and without DLD that could yield useful clinical information