Conceptual Subordination in Typical and Atypical Child Language Development

Abstract

Subordination in child language is usually approached from a structural perspective, focusing on grammatical forms. For children with developmental language disorder (DLD), it remains unclear whether their difficulties with subordination are due solely to morphosyntactic limitations or also reflect a reduced capacity to establish conceptual relationships between propositions. Drawing on the notion of conceptual subordination, this study examines the ability of children with typical development (TD) and DLD to recognize and encode it in Spanish. The sample consisted of 40 Spanish-speaking 10-year-old children (TD = 25; DLD = 15), who completed a verbal task to elicit clausal relations with conceptual load. Responses were transcribed and analyzed by two expert raters, yielding moderate agreement (k = .45). Results did not reveal significant group differences in conceptual subordination production. However, encoding strategies diverged: both groups used prototypical forms, but children with DLD relied more on alternative forms than their TD peers. The complexity of encoding varied across relationship types and depended on the semantic properties of the associations. These findings indicate that while children with DLD can establish conceptual subordinations, their difficulties lie in selecting and managing the morphosyntactic resources required to encode them. Accordingly, language therapy should prioritize strengthening diverse subordination strategies, particularly for relationships with high semantic-syntactic density.