Abstract

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting linguistic abilities, can experience difficulties throughout their schooling, such as in mathematics. Solving word problems, a language-dependent task, requires children to understand the text, and identify the semantic relationships between the problem’s quantities to solve them. Therefore, gaining insights on the effects of DLD on word-problem solving can help support the learning of children with DLD. The present study compares the word-problem solving abilities of typically-developing (TD) children (n = 28) and children with DLD (n = 16). Children were recruited in schools in Montreal, Quebec City, and Sherbrooke, or in private speech-language pathology’ clinics. During two videorecorded sessions, students were invited to solve additive word problems created by the research team. The groups were compared on accuracy, the appropriateness of their strategies, and error types. Also, a strategy profile was assigned to each child based on the most frequent strategy used to explore potential differences among the groups. The findings of this study highlight significant differences between the groups on accuracy, strategy appropriateness, and the frequency and types of errors produced. DLD appears to affect the way children understand the text, identify relevant information, abstract the problem structure, use a strategy aligned with the problem structure, and compute answers. In contrast, the distribution of the strategy profiles is similar in each group: They tend to use the standard algorithm (e.g., formal procedure taught in class) even if they make mistakes. Moreover, they still rely on manipulatives to solve word problems.