Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Typically Developing Children learn novel nouns more easily than novel verbs: An experimental comprehension and production study

Previous research suggests that nouns are generally learned more easily than verbs. However, few stud-ies have investigated this issue amongst children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or pre-sented novel verbs and nouns in comparable training contexts. The present study therefore compared noun and verb learning in 18 Children with DLD and 36 Typically developing (TD) children aged from 3;1 (years; months) to 4;10. Participants were presented with two short cartoon videos that were dubbed with an audio script containing three novel nouns and three novel verbs (six novel nouns and six novel verbs in total). Children completed a comprehension and production task both immediately post-test and in a retention follow-up three to five days later. The TD children outperformed the children with DLD on both comprehension and production (though only in the retention test session and not the im-mediate test session). Although a noun advantage was observed, there was no evidence that its magni-tude differs between TD children and children with DLD.