Use of relative clauses by children with DLD (Zeng et al., 2026)

The moderator analysis provided no evidence that RC type or language impacted the overall effect size. However, it showed that task type was a significant moderator. Specifically, the difference in the performance on RC tasks between children with DLD and TD children was not statistically significant in discourse elicitation, syntactic priming, and sentence judgment tasks, while their performance on the sentence–picture matching task, the character–picture matching task, the preference elicitation task, the picture description task, and the sentence repetition task showed significance. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions:</b> Across the included languages, children with DLD show markedly poorer performance than their TD peers on RC tasks for both subject and object RCs.

Moderator analyses detected no significant variation by RC type or language but indicated that task type significantly modulates the magnitude of the DLD–TD difference. </p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>PRISMA checklist. </p><p dir="ltr">Zeng, X., Gao, M., & Shirai, Y., (2026). The performance on relative clauses in children with and without developmental language disorder: A meta-analysis. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research</i>.

Advance online publication. <a href="doi.org/10.1044/2026_JSLHR-24-00625" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">doi.org/10.1044/2026_JSLHR-24-00625</a></p>