Original title: Identifying and Describing Emergent Writing Profiles of Preschoolers with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Conceptual Replication of Guo et al. (2018)
Danika Pfeiffer, Alexander Choi-Tucci, Casey Branson, Alexis Clark · September 2026
Young children start learning to write letters and words before they can fully read. Researchers wanted to understand how preschool writing skills differ, especially for children with developmental language disorder, a condition that makes learning and using language difficult. The researchers evaluated the language and early writing skills of 4- and 5-year-old preschoolers. They grouped the children based on their letter and word writing scores. This created three skill groups: Beginning Writing, Intermediate Writing, and Advanced Writing. The study found that most preschoolers with developmental language disorder, specifically 68%, landed in the Beginning Writing group. In contrast, children with typically developing language skills were spread almost equally across all three groups. The researchers also tested if factors like age, gender, and an early literacy index predicted which group a child joined. While statistically linked, these factors lacked practical value for predicting a child's profile.
Imagine a kindergarten teacher sorting children's drawings into three piles: simple scribbles, shapes that look like letters, and recognizable words. The teacher notices that most children who struggle to speak are in the scribble pile, while others are spread across all piles. In this paper, the researchers similarly grouped children's writing into three levels and found that most children with language difficulties are in the lowest level, suggesting that early language support is crucial for writing development.
Writing skills in preschool predict later reading and academic success. This study shows that children with developmental language disorder are at high risk for struggling with writing, and that current simple measures may not capture the full picture. Understanding these profiles can help educators and speech-language pathologists target intervention earlier and more effectively.
The sample was small, especially the DLD group (19 children), limiting generalizability. The predictors (age, gender, ALL Index) were statistically but not practically significant, meaning other unmeasured factors likely matter. Only letter and word writing were assessed, not spelling or composition. The cross-sectional design cannot track development over time. The abstract itself calls for additional writing measures to capture nuances.
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Identifying and Describing Emergent Writing Profiles of Preschoolers with and without Developmental Language Disorder: A Conceptual Replication of Guo et al. (2018) — Danika Pfeiffer, Alexander Choi-Tucci, Casey Branson et al. — EdArXiv — doi:10.35542/osf.io/p9brh_v2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.