Communicative Profiles of Children with Developmental Delay Compared to Age- or Language-Matched Typically Developing Peers.
Benchmark pragmatic goals to language age, not calendar age, for preschoolers with developmental delay.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Saban-Bezalel (2025) watched the preschoolers during free play. Twenty had developmental delay (DD). Twenty were the same age but typically developing. Twenty more were younger TD kids who talked like the DD group.
The team counted how many times each child tried to talk, ask, tell, or protest. They also noted how complex each move was.
What they found
Kids with DD used fewer and simpler messages than same-age peers. Their numbers looked almost identical to the younger, language-matched TD group.
In short, their communication age matched their language age, not their birth age.
How this fits with other research
Yin et al. (2026) ran a similar match-up but studied play instead of talk. They also found DD kids acted like younger TD kids, showing the delay pattern crosses domains.
Gillespie-Lynch et al. (2019) looked at friendship hopes in older ASD students. When matched by mental age, the ASD group looked typical, just like the DD preschoolers looked typical here when matched by language age.
Michel et al. (2024) seems to clash. They say selective attention, not just delay, drives vocabulary gaps in bilingual DLD. The difference is method: Lisa studied extra cognitive factors and bilinguals, while Ronit kept to simple matching.
Why it matters
When you write goals for a preschooler with DD, ignore the birthday. Aim for the level of a TD child who talks the same amount. That keeps goals tough but fair, and it stops you from demanding adult-like messages from a kid who is still at a two-year-old language stage.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Expressing communicative intentions is a fundamental pragmatic skill that develops early in childhood, enabling individuals to meet personal and social needs. This ability relies on cognitive, social, and linguistic competencies, which can pose challenges for children with intellectual disability (ID) or global developmental delays (GDD). This research examines the communicative profile, including the communicative intentions produced and the means of production of young children with ID or GDD (the developmental delay group-DD) compared to their typically developing (TD) peers during a structured pragmatic protocol. Seventy-two children aged 24 to 68 months participated in the study, divided across three groups: twenty-three children with DD, twenty-three TD children matched by chronological age to the children with DD, and twenty-five TD children matched by language age to the children with DD. All children underwent a structured pragmatic observation protocol that prompted the production of communicative intentions. Significant differences were observed when comparing children with DD to their age-matched TD peers, namely, TD children produced more social communicative intentions and used more complex means of production. A more similar communicative profile was found between the DD group and equivalent language-matched TD peers. Language ability was associated with producing a greater variety of communicative intents for both language-matched groups; however, better executive functions were associated with a broader variety only among younger TD children. This study highlights delays in communicative profiles and differences in related variables between children with DD and their TD peers of equivalent chronological age, and of equivalent language age.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1080/20473869.2023.2215606