Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) display impaired phonological and/or morpho-syntactic skills. To detect these impairments, it would be of value to devise tasks that assess specific markers of implicit linguistic competence. We administered a forced choice semantic categorization task developed in Italian (Belacchi and Cubelli in Journal of psycholinguistic research 41:295–310, 2012) for detecting the implicit use of grammatical gender markers in classifying epicenes names of animals: phonological and/or syntactic. Seventy Italian children with expressive-phonological DLD (mean age: 61.20 months) were compared with a same-size control group. Overall, the children with DLD performed more poorly than the control group. Also, the DLD participants used the phonological index to a significantly lesser extent, confirming their specific impairment in the phonological processing of words. The current study provided evidence for the status of phonological discrimination skills as a precursor of language development, and the value of using categorization tasks to assess implicit linguistic competence in children with DLD.

患有发育性语言障碍 (DLD) 的儿童表现出语音和/或形态句法技能受损。为了检测这些障碍，设计评估内隐语言能力的特定标记的任务将是有价值的。我们执行了一项用意大利语开发的强制选择语义分类任务（Belacchi 和 Cubelli 在心理语言学研究杂志 41:295–310, 2012）中检测语法性别标记在动物表观名称分类中的隐含使用：语音和/或句法。将 70 名患有表现性语音 DLD 的意大利儿童（平均年龄：61.20 个月）与相同规模的对照组进行了比较。总体而言，DLD 患儿的表现比对照组差。此外，DLD 参与者使用语音索引的程度要小得多，确认他们在单词的语音处理方面的特定障碍。目前的研究为语音辨别技能作为语言发展前兆的地位以及使用分类任务评估 DLD 儿童内隐语言能力的价值提供了证据。