Online pronoun resolution in children with developmental language disorder (DLD): A visual world eye-tracking study

Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often experience difficulties with morphosyntax and discourse processing, which hinder their ability to establish referential coherence. While pronoun resolution has been extensively studied in typically developing (TD) children, little is known about how children with DLD process pronouns in real time, especially in Spanish—a language with rich morphology and flexible word order. This study investigated how Spanish-speaking children with DLD interpret third-person subject pronouns during sentence comprehension, examining their use of semantic and syntactic cues in reference resolution. Across three eye-tracking experiments, we tested children’s reliance on semantic gender cues in overt pronouns (Experiment 1), on syntactic cues such as grammatical role and order of mention in overt pronouns (Experiment 2), and on these same cues in null pronouns (Experiment 3). Participants were 48 Spanish–Catalan bilingual children: 16 with DLD, 16 age-matched TD peers, and 16 younger TD children matched by mean length of utterance. Eye movements during a visual world task were analyzed using growth curve and mixed-effects models. Results showed that children with DLD used semantic gender cues when available and relied on first-mentioned or subject referents when such cues were absent, suggesting compensatory use of structural heuristics in pronoun resolution.