Exploratory Behavioral Study of the Production and Processing of French Categorical Liaisons in Children with Expressive DLD

Categorical liaison-defined as the obligatory pronunciation of a latent word in the form of a final consonant when followed by a vowel as the initial word or a word beginning with a silent "h" (e.g., des‿ours [dezuʁs])-is a robust phonological phenomenon in French and an informative window into morphophonological development. This exploratory behavioral study investigates the dissociation between perception and production of categorical liaisons among 24 French-speaking children aged 6-10 years diagnosed with expressive Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). A battery of nine ad hoc tasks assessed perception and production across words, pseudowords, noun phrases, and sentences. Results showed that children with DLD performed comparably to typically developing peers in perceiving unrealized categorical liaisons but exhibited significantly more omissions in production, regardless of context or age. Production deficits correlated with reduced working memory and inhibitory control. These preliminary findings provide descriptive data that can inform the development of standardized assessment tools and generate hypotheses about the cognitive mechanisms underlying categorical liaison difficulties in DLD.